Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's very pleasing to hear the member for Parramatta talk about drivers of jobs and growth. It was only a couple of hours ago that we heard some wonderful news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics: the figure for jobs growth in this nation in the last month was 54,200—substantially above what was predicted. All the economic experts predicted an increase of 20,000. We have had 54,200 new jobs created in this economy in the last month. What a vote of confidence by the business community in this coalition government. This is something we should be proud of. We've sometimes seen those ABS statistics vary a little bit. Sometimes they will be a little bit inconsistent. But, for the last several months, we've had continuing very, very strong job growth in this country. Although the headline unemployment rate number has stayed consistent, that is only because we've had a significant increase in the participation rate, up from 65.1 per cent to 65.3 per cent. This is good news. We heard this morning that the dollar has also surged on this news.

The coalition is getting on with the work. We are getting on with driving growth in this economy and we are getting job growth happening. What we must always remember is that the 54,200 new jobs created in this economy over the last month were not created by governments or bureaucrats. They were created by private individuals putting their capital on the line and taking a risk, taking a business risk, taking the risk to put on a new employee. And that is exactly what the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enterprise Tax Plan No. 2) Bill 2017 is about. This bill is about lowering the rate of corporate tax in this nation to incentivise people to continue to take that risk.

Although we can be very satisfied with that rate of job growth in the last month, there is still a lot more work to do. We must make sure our nation is internationally competitive for those in the business community that we ask to go out there and put on new employees. We've got to give them an internationally competitive environment to play in, and we can't do that if we are burdening them with a higher rate of corporate tax than we see in other countries. Peter Costello, the former Treasurer, understood this. The shadow Treasurer, the member for McMahon, used to understand this. He actually wrote an entire book on the subject of the importance of lowering your corporate tax rate to incentivise business investment and get jobs growth happening.

But, sadly, today's Labor Party no longer believe in that. They no longer understand the importance of business having an international competitive playing field to compete on. So they are quite happy to see the corporate tax rate in this country well above OECD averages. They are prepared to see personal rates of tax in this country well above averages. How can we incentivise young Australians to stay in this country with Labor's policy of an almost 50 per cent rate? They want to have a top marginal tax rate of 49.5 per cent. That is the rate that they want against somewhere like Singapore or Hong Kong, with 15 or 17 per cent. That becomes a disincentive.

Dr Chalmers interjecting—

And the so-called tax increase, which I hear the member at the table bellowing about, is to finance the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We owe it to those disabled people—we have to owe it to them. We can all talk up a big game here about how we all support the National Disability Insurance Scheme, but we have to fund it. It would've been wonderful if we could've funded it from a budget surplus. It would've been wonderful if we could've funded it from additional growth. But the reality is: the only way that we can fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme is to ask everyone to contribute a little bit more through their Medicare levy—and we have Labor members coming in here representing that as a tax increase.

The member for Parramatta also went on about renewable energy and how important that is and the uncertainty that's facing it and how there's no investment in renewable energy. That's simply untrue. There's something like $7 billion being invested in renewable energy in this country today. But the problem is that it's being invested in importing containers of solar panels from China and importing foreign-made wind turbines. It is not the investment that we need. The investment in renewables should go into research and development, not into the rollout of the current technology. We have seen from the Australian Energy Market Operator's report that when we most need our electricity, in that time of peak demand, we can only rely on renewables for two per cent of their capacity. So the $7 billion of investment is doing nothing to fix the shortfall of generation capacity in this nation. It is doing nothing to encourage research and development in what we need.

What we really need to do is make sure that the investment is in the best areas of the economy, and the worst people to pick that—the worst people to decide how that should be—are government. We need to release the private sector to put their investment capital on the line, where they think it will do best. They will not always get it right. The majority of Australian businesses after several years, we know, will no longer be trading. But those few businesses that continue to grow and expand are the ones that will drive our economy forward in the future.

The other thing that we need to have international competitiveness on is not only our taxation system but the cost of energy. We've seen the policies of the Labor Party: a 50 per cent renewable energy target that will do nothing but drive up the cost of electricity even more than what it has been in this nation. We have seen the example from South Australia, the state that now has the proud title of having the world's highest electricity costs. It has pursued a policy of a 50 per cent renewable energy target, and what has it delivered? The world's highest electricity costs. How are we going to get business investment and job creation if we go down the track of putting in policies that the Labor Party want that will deliver such high, internationally uncompetitive electricity prices?

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