Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with pleasure to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2015-2016 before the House today and note the comments of the member for Kingsford Smith. It would be remiss of me not to take him to task on a couple of those things. The year of ideas—or was that 'idea'?—it seems to me could be summed up as the Labor party saying: 'If elected to government, we will put our hands deeper into the pockets of Australians. We will spend more, we will not lose our addiction to spending that got us into this situation that we are now trying to deal with and we will put up taxes.'

As we all know, taxes are paid by working Australians, those mums and dads that own small businesses around our country and, of course, businesses more generally. The Labor Party suggests that whacking tobacco smokers will be part of their solution for funding the difficulties that the nation has inherited from six years of spending under Labor between 2007 and 2013. The poorest and the most vulnerable within our community will be hit the hardest. Indeed, there are those who have looked at this policy and raised real and, I think, justifiable concerns in respect of the prohibitionist style of policy here. We all know it is something that is not good for anybody's health, but that will drive more smokers to products underground. That will drive more smokers to illegal products. That will drive smokers to products from which the Commonwealth can extract no tobacco excise, to products that are likely to be increasingly controlled by criminal elements within our society.

The member for Kingsford Smith mentioned that Labor will crack down on those wealthy Australians who have saved for their retirement and enjoy $75,000 of income on their savings that they have put away. They will go after them. Here is a message out there to all those self-funded retirees: you cannot trust Labor when it comes to superannuation.

The hypocrisy of those opposite. I sat in here on the last sitting day before the Christmas break. On this side of the House were the government and the member for Melbourne, a member of the Greens party who, like his colleagues in the other place, had supported significant reforms to make sure that multinational companies operating in Australia did in fact pay their fair share of tax. If my memory serves me correctly, the only people in this place who voted against those reforms were the Labor Party. The hypocrisy of those opposite!

And then of course we come to the topic du jour, indeed, in the 'year of ideas', and that is negative gearing. I am a simple man. I worked in the wool industry for many years. I worked for a trading company in Melbourne, but I spent a lot of money on behalf of my principals and for the customers that we were supplying in all four corners of the globe. I can tell you that, when I was sitting in an auction room, the thing that brought the most joy to my heart was to see one of my competitors in bidding on similar products walking out of the room. What did it mean? It meant that prices almost certainly went down. You could apply the same at a sheep sale or a livestock sale.

Indeed, there is the example of what the Labor Party did in government in a panicked response to a social media campaign, an email campaign, and the lives and the businesses that paid a terrible, terrible price in northern Australia in respect of the live cattle export trade. But it was not just those families who were impacted directly and the transport businesses and the other business associated with that; there was the knock-on impact. It knocked down through Queensland. It knocked down through New South Wales to Victoria to the yearling sales in Tasmania. It impacted on every person around the country trying to sell cattle at that time and for many months afterwards.

So it is at a house auction. So it is when the competition is reduced for a home property. Those opposite have put forward that the policy for negative gearing would only apply to new houses. Well, blow me down with a feather. It is a bit like the new car being driven out of the dealer's premises. Drive it out, and the price falls by 20 per cent. Immediately you are devaluing an asset. The incentives here are all wrong. The signals are all wrong. As the Prime Minister said today, this is economics 101, and unfortunately the Labor Party have failed dismally. I just wonder whether or not they have consulted with some of their own Labor colleagues, the premiers of the states, because I wonder how they might feel about the value of land tax transactions going down as a result of house prices going down in their communities.

Since coming to government, we have turned this engine of state around. In fact, you can do no better than to point to the job creation—and everything, really, that this government has done over the last 2½ years has been about job creation. Indeed, 300,000 jobs have been created in the last 12 months alone. There has been jobs growth of 2.6 per cent, higher than the 10-year average of 1.8 per cent—not high enough, of course. We know we need to do more.

There has been record funding for education and health, but I think what has captured the attention of Australians and has captured the attention of small business particularly and, more broadly, those who take an interest in the economy is the innovation agenda that the government has embarked upon—led, of course, by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister Pyne. The National Innovation and Science Agenda has rekindled a degree of confidence in this country that has been welcomed by business and is permeating to the mums and dads who see the confidence being restored. I will get to practical examples of that in my home state of Tasmania.

No state more than Tasmania has been able to take advantage of and understand the benefits that have flowed to this country, and specifically Tasmania, from the trade agreements that have been signed by Minister Robb on behalf of our nation in South Korea, Japan and, of course, China.

I think that the participation in the workforce of women is a very, very strong indicator, again, of that confidence of mums and the support that we are providing them through the $5.5 billion childcare package, which is encouraging and providing mothers with more opportunities to get back in the workforce. If we have a similar proportion of female workplace participation in this country compared to, for example, a similar country such as Canada—a small population in a large country—the value to the Australian economy in terms of its increased size is roughly $25 billion a year. It is worth putting the effort in to encourage mums to get back to work.

There has been more money going into health and education. There is a focus on those subjects, the STEM subjects, that will provide the jobs of the future for more and more Australians. Particularly, again, in my home state, the opportunities that I see lie within advanced manufacturing, particularly within the food sector.

And of course there is the record investment that this government has made in respect of infrastructure, $50 billion over 10 years that is revitalising the productive infrastructure of our country, building new productive infrastructure that will set up our country to transition the economy. That is what we are doing. We are moving from what was a boom time in this nation of the construction phase within the mining sector. They have moved into the production phase. Yes, they face their challenges with commodity prices as they stand at the moment. But transitioning the Australian economy into a more diversified economy depends on the investment that we are making in infrastructure, not least of all in my home state of Tasmania.

Of course, reform within the workplace has been a focus of this government as well. Unfortunately—and it has been topical today in the debate that has just concluded—we are seeing what is happening within the Senate on the reforms that we are proposing around the Australian Building and Construction Commission and registered organisations to apply the same rigour to the way that unions are managed that applies to corporate entities in Australia. I do not think it is asking too much. The same standard that applies to public entities in this country, frankly, should apply to those organisations that purport to represent working Australians. These are all measures that are about driving productivity in our nation.

In my home state of Tasmania we are leading the way, and we have done so for more than 18 months, in terms of small and medium business enterprise confidence. We used to describe Labor and the Greens running the show in Canberra as a 'double whammy', but in Tasmania we had the double whammy. We had a Labor government at home in coalition, with ministers in cabinet—some of whom now reside in the other place—running our state into the ground. No more. We put a plan forward to the Tasmanian people: we would focus on rebuilding our state to capitalise on the entrepreneurial spirit that exists within the people of Tasmania and the people of my electorate.

And so it is that in two short years we have been able to, through re-engendering confidence and focusing on a can-do attitude, deliver our state some stunning results in terms of business confidence. There is one thing I would like to highlight: we have had close in recent days—certainly in the last week or so—the Tasmanian Jobs and Investment Fund. This is a fund that the Commonwealth contributed $16 million to. The Tasmanian government has added $8 million to that, which, indeed, we welcome. It is for businesses looking to expand, to innovate and to grow their businesses, creating more jobs for more Tasmanians.

It is funding that is available on a competitive basis for businesses—$1 of funding for every $2 that the business is investing. Indeed, without getting into the specifics, it is being managed by AusIndustry, and I look forward to the work that they will do. It will be a difficult job, I have no doubt. There were 140 applications for the $24 million that is available to businesses looking to expand. Those applications were for nearly $107 million, with matching funding of $362 million—totalling almost half a billion dollars of proposed investment.

What this will mean for my state is truly transformational. This will mean, and it is evidence of, businesses having an increasing confidence that, in Canberra, we have a government with a plan. We have a government that is focused on the things that Australians want us to be focused on. They know we have not had it all our own way. We have a state government at home that is supporting the work of the Commonwealth government, and I look forward to being part of the continued work that I can do in this space to encourage more jobs and growth in Tasmania.

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