Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

This is an appropriations bill so I am allowed to speak on anything I want, but I am going to speak about money today; in fact, almost entirely about money—because where you put it and where you get it from tells more about your priorities and values than the words that you speak. That has never been truer than for this government. When I go out into my community, when I meet with business groups, and when I meet with associations all around the country, I feel their growing sense of frustration: while the government talks about jobs and growth, it has been four years now with the government—in the most generous description—with their finger on the pause button or, in many areas, they are well into reverse.

I have said in this House before that when Tony Abbott was first rolled, even though I thought it would not be good for Labor, I felt a sense of optimism because I did not believe it could go on the way it was—I did not believe, at that time of extraordinary change, where the whole world was facing something as profound as we were, that you could continue governing with your finger on the pause button. So I welcomed the change of leader. But in the last two years, I have to say that my frustration and, at times, my depression have grown almost to the extent that I am really hoping that the government gets its act together. I really am. It is unusual for a member on the Labor side to say that but—quite frankly—at the moment, getting the government back on track and getting the nation back on track has to be our priority. I genuinely wish the government well in trying to get its act together, because we cannot continue the way we are.

The world faces an extraordinary range of challenges, and so does this country. We do not talk much about the fourth industrial revolution, but we all know that it is going to be as profound as the first one. It will see massive change. It will see the number of full-time jobs dramatically decrease. It will see the whole way that we manage things within structure—where structure does the work—change to a completely different way: where cooperation, rather than competition, drives prosperity. The world is going to change in ways that we cannot imagine yet. In that change, there will be losers in very large numbers around the world, and in this country if we do not act. We are facing environmental degradation. We have seen species extinction at rates we have never seen before. We have seen several species of bees go on the endangered list in the last few weeks alone. We have seen kilometres of mangroves die completely, up on Cape York. We have seen large sections of the Reef dead beyond recovery. We are seeing rising temperatures through carbon emissions. We know, as a result of that, that we are also going to have water and food shortages. We are going to see a dramatic reduction in the number of full-time jobs and an increase in casualisation, even within the next 10 to 15 years.

We are going to see large numbers of jobless—in numbers that we really have not encountered for a couple of centuries. We are seeing in our communities the rising cost of housing. We are seeing around the world the rapid development of high-speed internet, with Australia slipping down the rankings seemingly every month. We are seeing the emergence of data as the new oil. We do not really know what that is going to look like yet, but we know that data itself is going to change the way things are done and is going to become a major determinant of prosperity.

So there is stuff to be done in looking at how Australia positions itself in this world. Every year we leave it, other places around the world are getting further ahead and we get further and further behind. In a world where cooperation actually drives prosperity, the places in the world where that cooperation is taking place are accelerating far faster than those that do not—and every month we delay we get further and further behind and we lose some of our best people.

I would not say that I am a glass-half-full person. I look at a glass half full and think, 'Oh, goodness; there is room for more.' So I am kind of at the extreme end. I see a glass half full as an opportunity to put more in. So, when I see these massive problems, I actually see possibilities in them. For me, sometimes, economically at least, the problem is the answer. That is what business does. Business sees a problem and solves it. So, when there are these massive challenges facing the world, it is an opportunity for this country to be in there driving its business to solve them and grow because of them. Every problem, every single one, becomes a possibility for business—purely in economic terms. I am not denying that they are terrible problems but, in purely economic terms, every problem is the answer—every single one. If you see a river you cannot cross, someone builds a bridge. If the banks are not lending, FinTec emerges. If the power networks keep upping the fixed costs in the power bill—their Kodak moment will come—batteries will grow so fast they will not know what hit them. Every challenge becomes the answer if you are prepared to think that way—and we as a nation and we in this place have to do that.

I take solar as an example. Two years ago when we first started having our really, really hot summers, someone said, 'It is all that sun beaming down on the western roof,' and I said, 'You've got to be kidding; that is the answer.' If the sun is beaming down on your city and making the city hot and you think that is a problem, it is also the answer. The answer and the problem are the same thing. The situation at the time, though, was that our feed-in tariffs assumed that it was more profitable to put your solar panels north. But the answer was right there. Since that time, we have seen the emergence of green-tech, with several companies investigating peer-to-peer power, where, instead of selling it to the power company for six cents a kilowatt hour and they sell it to your neighbour for 26c, you sell it for that. The New South Wales government has said that it will allow it. There are at least six companies that I can find in a quick Google that are already working on that. It is a massive opportunity. There are a few other places in the world, but we can be the first there. We can become the expert. We can actually develop the platform that does that.

We are good at this. Australia is a great creative nation. Our greatest asset is actually in our minds, not in the ground. We are incredibly good at this stuff and we should be all over it. With renewables generally, we should be all over it. We have better natural assets for renewables than perhaps any other country in the world. We led the world in solar power—before the Howard government was so slow on emissions trading, back in its time. We had 12 per cent of the world market in solar panels, and we lost it—we gave it away, just by doing nothing and by not recognising the opportunity that was there.

Then there is the loss of full-time work. If you take the human aspect out of it, you can explain it in terms that, in the industrial age, where we built factories, a full-time job was the logical economic model. But, in the new cooperative style of businesses that will develop, it is not as logical to have full-time work. So we will see a loss of full-time work and a move towards part-time work. But the reality for communities is that, while the full-time work was incredibly good, the by-product of it was actually the baby. The full-time work was, if you like, the bath and the by-product was the baby. It was the social cohesion of knowing your neighbours, living and working in the same suburb and the financial security that allowed families to have one working person and the other one working on all the social relationships which created the safety net in the community. That social cohesion—knowing your neighbours, feeling financially secure—is the baby that we are going to lose when we start to lose full-time jobs.

Around the world now, in academic institutions, social enterprises and financial investment companies looking at impact investing, there are people trying to work out how you commercialise that baby—how you make social good for a community profitable. When we have been in a market where profit comes from one-on-one interactions, how do you turn social good or community good back into an economically viable product so you can scale it? All of the work on impact investing, social impact bonds, social enterprises, benefit corporations and a whole range of other things go back to how you regrow the baby, how you grow the things of value that we will lose when we change from one use of capital to another.

This is incredibly important. Billions of dollars are sitting in funds around the world—and there have been billions of dollars for quiet some time. There is a task force in the Prime Minister's office that has been there for quite some time. Where is the action that says that we can be leaders in this? The world money for this flows across international borders, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars from financiers looking for projects that they can scale worldwide. They are looking for it—and where are we? We are talking about 18C. We are talking about cutting the take-home pay of some of the most vulnerable families in Australia. We are talking about ripping the spending capacity out of our communities in every way the government can think of—whether it is cutting family payments, reducing the energy supplement or refusing to deal with the cut in take-home pay for hospitality workers. That is what this government is doing. It is not growing anything. It is cutting the spending capacity of a community, but it is the spending capacity of a community that makes the community grow. Customers make you rich. You do not cut the spending capacity of your customers unless you are crazy, and that is what this government is doing.

We have the rising cost of housing. We know with recent research—but it does not take research; you just know—that, if you increase the cost of housing so that you price the majority of people out of the housing market, you increase your pension costs down the track and you increase homelessness because of the vulnerability of people who do not have that housing security. Almost every solution that we hear either improves the capacity of a person to pay for the higher cost of housing, which will just drive up prices, or reduces the size of the land by rezoning for high-rise. If you rezone for high-rise, every block of land gets the developer price and the house prices in the area go up—not down. If you rezone for smaller blocks, like they are doing in WA, then you will not be able to afford a block that is any more than 110 square metres because the development price will go into the block.

It seems that every solution we have drives prices up, but there are solutions around the world. The whole world is dealing with this. Where are we? Why is it that when we talk about housing affordability and I Google or do some research—or get the library to do research—on what the great approaches are around the world, I do not find them in Australia? I find them elsewhere. I find them in Europe. I find them in some states of the US. There are incredibly innovative, creative ways of getting people into housing. When was the last time this government got a group of potential customers in a room and found out what they would go for? When was the last time they did anything other than talk to the banks and big developers about this? It is about what a customer will take. It is about what a person in the community—what a young person, a casual cleaner, a fireman, a nurse, a teacher—wants to live in and what they are prepared to do, because they are walking away from the current housing market in droves.

We have regtech. I love regtech; I have been talking about it for a while. This is a new form of technology where companies are looking to use software to reduce regulation. A simple example is, if you break down in the middle of nowhere and a windscreen repairer comes to repair your windscreen, he types your mobile phone number and your credit card number into his mobile phone, pushes send and the bank sends you an invoice instantly. And that invoice has everything that you need for your BAS—you do not have staff; it is already there. So why doesn't the act of paying it generate the BAS? For that matter, why doesn't the act of paying a staff member generated the deferred payment for super and the deferred payment for PAYG and all the paperwork? The technology is there. But, instead of putting small business to work on this, we have a government that thinks that big business and big departments are the answer.

We see some incredible failures by the government. At a time when data is about to become incredibly valuable, this government gives stuff away just before it becomes valuable: 'Data is about to become valuable, so we are going to privatise a bit of it here and privatise a bit of it there, wipe out the public sector's capacity to manage it, and weaken our skill level'. As a result, we have seen the census fail; the National Disability Insurance Agency unable to process some paperwork for a year—we had kids waiting for up to a year for an assessment; we have also had the robo-debt debacle; we have had crashes of the ATO system—that was down sometimes for a couple of days each week for a couple of weeks; we have had the privatisation of data; and we have had the extraordinary failure of the NBN.

We have also had the weakening of the capacity of the public sector. One of the by-products of a public sector is this incredible body of knowledge—who did what when, whether it worked, the connections that they have as a by-product of their job. And when you sack them, you cannot replace that. That is gone. And there is no other source for that—not in academia, not in business. It is the only place where that overview actually exists. We can see the loss of what is going to be incredibly valuable, and we have just given it away. There is much to be done: I really urge the government to get on with it. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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