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

We hear this occasional argument about the war on young people, and it is worth putting it in perspective. It is a rare thing to listen to a federal debate where there is almost no complaint about the health system from the Labor Party, but that really is a measure of just how well Medicare, the PBS and the PBAC are functioning. There has just been a complete farrago of new drugs approved—I think 1,200 in the last 4½ years. What we are seeing is an exceptionally well run health system, one which the Labor opposition are increasingly finding difficult to take umbrage with. Of course, that is something that has been perennially the opposition's showcase element. When you were in doubt coming into an election, starting a scare campaign based around Medicare was usually the way you got through a campaign and got pretty close to winning government.

I want to focus particularly on young people, who will be watching the debate today. When you clear away the usual boredom of 'Labor said this and Liberal said that', what people are trying to understand—and I do apologise, Deputy Speaker, that I referred to some of this earlier this morning in this very chamber—is where this Leader of the Opposition stands. It is very unusual to see a strongly performing opposition with a leader whom people do not want to come within 50 feet of. That is a very unusual political circumstance in the cycle of history, and it is important to dig down to why it is the case. Obviously, from our point of view, the longer he stays in the job the better. But what we are seeing—without giving any suggestions to members of his caucus—is a situation where, increasingly, for everything he says, he said something exactly the opposite just a few years ago. In this world of social media, it is all recorded. You cannot go to a community meeting and say to people, 'I fully support a public vote on same-sex marriage,' and then make the cornerstone of your period in opposition a vehement fight against the public having a vote on same-sex marriage. I cannot even use different words. It is exactly the same argument, and a complete flip from one position to the other.

That is not something you could really have accused the great Julia Gillard or the Great Kevin Rudd of! For one thing, they were passionate people driven by ideology. But we have moved into a new era of leaders, particularly with respect to your party, Deputy Speaker Bird, driven by the political pragmatism of the moment. A great example is Adani. I know that Deputy Speaker Bird, who is in the chamber at the moment, is not from Queensland, but having the Queensland Premier say, 'We strongly support the job-creating ability of a large company coming here and developing a coalmine where nobody else will'—environmental concerns aside; they obviously have to be met—has a certain public benefit. For the Leader of the Opposition to then run on some inner-city argument, topped with goat cheese and dill, that not a single taxpayer dollar should go towards the funding of the mine shows he obviously does not understand that every resource project in this country since Federation has had an element of taxpayers' money going towards getting it started. It might have been a public rail line, because all rail was publicly built back in those days. Now all we are talking about is providing a loan, which will be fully paid back, with interest, to the taxpayer, to develop that rail line. That is not controversial. The Leader of the Opposition is saying that federally not a dollar of taxpayers' money should go towards the mine, which GetUp!—or 'Get Labor Up!'—is running a campaign on. Talking out of one side of one's mouth sounds great on one side of the street.

But on the other side of one's mouth, of course, you have the same party saying the complete opposite up in Queensland, where you have people just desperate for a job or to have their dependants employed in, of all things, one of the largest coal mine projects. This is a foreign entity that is prepared to come and invest in this great nation and in its infrastructure—I mean, they cannot take the mine home with them if it all goes pear shaped. If the coal market does disappear, we are left with the jobs, with the infrastructure that they cannot fly home—and there is plenty of room for other mines if they wish to start—and with a rail link that looks after the entire sector and basin. It is a no-loss situation, as long as we are a nation that can run its tax system properly. That is why I have been particularly assiduous in looking at the deal where Queensland was going to give a royalty holiday to Adani. This is an issue that this courageous—in this circumstance—Labor Premier staked her career on, at the risk of being taken apart by very ambitious Deputy Premier. But she stood by her guns and said that every other major project has had royalty holidays and concessions in some shape or form. We do it because the global public good is greater. We know that the long-term interest is there. It is a complex calculation. It is beyond GetUp! and the click campaigns. But it is an important consideration for long-term employment, because we know that coal is not going to disappear tomorrow.

This fairly large diversion in this speech of mine is to point out that this federal Labor leader is just running the 'Get Labor Up!' line, which is completely different to the state Labor Premier, and he could not care less. There is no ideological connection here to his party. It is just what works best for the polls. There are lots of people in marginal seats who love the GetUp! click campaign, and this Leader of the Opposition is going to click away with them. But it does not stop there. It does not just stop at same-sex marriage. It does not stop at the NDIS, where we supported the Labor government to raise the Medicare levy because it works right across the board, paying according to need into a service that every one of us could require one day and be grateful for. We had that understanding in opposition. We just said we understand that the NDIS is above all of this. But here is a Labor leader who is now utterly unable to support precisely what he did in government just four years ago. We are not talking amnesic periods of time. We are not talking decades or making comparisons to the Whitlam era. This is the same bloke who was a minister. This entire chamber spoke right here and said, 'We need to raise the Medicare levy as the fairest way to fund something that everybody needs.' It is beyond this individual's ability to do the same thing that he did four years ago: support the same tax change with the same graduations and the same exemptions based on income. It is as if he just was not here four years ago, as if he was not even part of the debate when we followed his government in supporting the NDIS. This is the NDIS, for goodness' sake. We are not funding a chook raffle. This is the most important social intervention in a generation, and one that we give credit to the Labor Party for initiating. Are we in a world now where you just oppose absolutely everything, simply because it is going to be politically useful for your career, personally? We are a better parliament than that.

It does not stop there. It is also about the enterprise agreements. This is a Labor leader who was the architect of enterprise agreements that left up to half of the participants worse off. I understand that an enterprise agreement is a global agreement where some are slightly better off and some are slightly worse off. But Labor Party appointed Fair Work commissioners sign most of them off—120 of them. Then along comes a decision by the Fair Work umpire, four of the five of whom are actually Labor Party appointed, and he pulls up stumps and runs away the minute it comes in. We did not set up the Fair Work Commission. We did not appoint the participants. As soon as this huge amount of work is done by experts in the field, this Labor leader just cannot wait to rush away and oppose the decision. I could understand if it were just political convenience, but this is an individual who hand-designed enterprise agreements that left workers worse off. A piece of evidence is Penny Vickers, who worked late nights stacking shelves and realised she did not even get the award. This is a deal done by unions with big business. This is precisely the job description of the bloke who is now the Leader of the Opposition, who suddenly only hates an enterprise agreement if it is one not done by the union. If the union is involved, it is completely okay to leave workers worse off. We estimate there are around 250,000 Australians worse off due to the actions of a union—out to $300 million of lost wages.

Some EAs are worse than others. Coles is the one that leads, because of the nature of Coles' employment practices. They simply use more people in a position that could be worse off in late night and after-hours employment. But they are not the only guilty party. They all signed up. It appears to be well meaning, but they signed a piece of paper saying, 'No worker was worse off.' The signature is on the piece of paper. That is now being tested in the Federal Court.

My only issue here is that you cannot make a massive issue about a tiny enterprise agreement signed by a small sporting club in Queensland, rip out one worker when every other one of the 40 workers are happily employed and no worse off and make some ambit claim that you are thousands of dollars worth off. You cannot then bring this young woman down to parliament, parade her around this building, do press conferences and, when asked how you can prove that she is thousands of dollars worse off, respond with: 'We took her statement at face value. We did not check the pay sheets. We did not read the agreement and see it was signed off by a Labor New South Wales appointee to the Fair Work Commission.' You cannot exist in a world where there is no evidence to back up what you say.

My point is quite simply this: where precisely does this Leader of the Opposition stand on social policy? It is one thing to have an MBA—the great degree that no-one can fail—but, ultimately, you have to be able to have some discipline and say: 'Does this really stack up with Labor values or not?' If the Labor value is simply to oppose everything that is ever said by the other side, I can understand where you are heading. But we are going to keep rolling out what was said four years ago and contrasting it to what is said today, because you know what, Deputy Speaker—and I respect the difficult position I have put you in—Australians just want straight talk. They do not want to see someone who flips on their tail every time it, not gets tough, so much—I can understand that, as we all can be guilty occasionally of being seen to flip when it gets tough and we get hit with a blowtorch—because this is not tough at all. This is the NDIS. How hard is it to simply say, 'On these grounds, and we have done it before, we will wave that one through with pride.' We will hold our hands above our heads and say, 'We are delighted, as an opposition, to support it.' That is how easy it was to have a fully funded NDIS, but we are still not there yet.

This war on young people, which we increasingly hear has been qualitatively focus group tested and runs very well—getting young people to get upset. Fundamentally, young people have never had such fantastic access to bulk-billed pathology. Young people have never had such high levels of bulk-billing. They are now approaching over 85 per cent for GP practices, over 78 per cent specifically for seeing GPs and well into 83 per cent for all Medicare billing.

In the university debate we are increasingly hearing about how four per cent of tertiary education is funded. It is either funded by the person who gets the degree or it is funded by the taxpayer. Of course, this is where Labor is really torn: 'These students are our cup of tea and our bread and butter. They all roll up and vote for us, so, of course, we have to oppose any change that allows students to pay more.' But the bottom line is: what is the private capital good of a degree? It is worth millions of dollars for a number of degrees. But for most people they are way better off having a university degree than not. You do not pay a cent on the way through until, income contingent, it is paid back afterwards. It is awkward to listen to isn't it? In reality we are debating about if four per cent is paid for by the person who gets the degree when they earn the big bucks. If you do not earn the big bucks, you do not pay it back. It is quite simple—

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