Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It seems a little ironic, when solid economic news is coming out, that we are having a debate about whether there is a plan or not. I think that most small businesses out there would be horrified at the nature of a Labor government coming up with a plan.

What small businesses out there want is government out of their lives, not another plan. They want government out of their lives so that they can employ. They want government out of their lives so that they can get on with business. What they want is a solid and consistent approach to business and not to watch the surpluses accrued by responsible coalition governments frittered away like we saw over the last six years—and that is the great fear. We are not talking about plans; we are talking about a genuine fear of a return of a rat with a gold tooth saying he has a plan. That is not what they want. They do not want plans. What they want is confidence to employ.

Let's accept it: every developed economy has an issue with underemployment and under-utilisation—which is unemployment and underemployment added together. But we continue to defy market expectations. That is the big point. When you compare us to the US or to Canada, we are doing exceptionally well. In fact, reported growth rates are double those of the northern American economies.

Now, that is not by accident. America and Canada are resource-based economies facing exactly the same challenges that we are, transitioning to a broader-based approach. When you do that you have frictional challenges, with people moving out of where we had high terms of trade and looking for new work. It, by definition, creates high levels of underemployment as people find first small levels and then, later, greater levels of employment. That is a transition. It is precisely what we are doing, but we are doing it better than every other OECD nation. It is a gold star for Australia. Let's not get that wrong.

What I love about the opposition is when they are in a tight corner. They know that when they go home from Canberra and back to their electorate office there will be one big burly dude sitting in their waiting room, with a CFMEU hi-vis vest on and 'WTF' on their forehead, saying: 'Explain what happened in Canberra. What went wrong? What went so terribly wrong?' They will be able to say: 'Oh no, we threw a really big smelly cat on the table. We wasted the time of that parliament for at least an hour saying the economy wasn't being run well. Then we got onto gun laws. To be honest, just ignore the fact that we're not your operator anymore.'

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