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

I'm very pleased to hear the member for Lalor put forward the case for more baseload generation coal fired power stations, because that is the only way we are going to get electricity prices down in this country.

I come to something I'm very pleased to talk about. In the last 12 months, over 400,000 new jobs have been created in this economy. Think of our great MCG stadium; we could fill every single seat in that stadium four times over and we still couldn't fit in the number of people that have jobs created last year. Most of those jobs—over 300,000 of them—are full-time, and 70 per cent of them have been created in the private sector. In my electorate of Hughes, our unemployment rate is down to just 2.7 per cent. This is a sensational achievement of the coalition government.

How has it been done? It has not been done by the belief that government creates jobs—in fact, the exact opposite. It has been created by the belief that government destroys jobs, and the way that the government actually creates jobs is it gets out of the way and leaves it to the private sector to do so. The theory I think was best explained by President Ronald Reagan—yesterday would have been his 107th birthday—in one of his great quotes:

We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and, ultimately, human fulfilment are created from the bottom up, not the government down.

He said:

Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire post-war period, contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.

Hear, hear.

But there are some threats to our nation's prosperity on the horizon. Perhaps the greatest threat is the Labor Party's plans for a 50 per cent renewable energy target. We only have to look at the example of South Australia to see what happens when you implement a 50 per cent renewable energy target. The study showed that that has delivered that state the highest electricity prices not just in the nation but in the entire world. With a 50 per cent renewable energy target, in the entire world South Australia now holds that prize. What do we see? Yesterday, on his Facebook page, the member for Port Adelaide wrote, 'South Australia leads the way.' They certainly do! We know what the future is if we copy South Australia. We cannot support Labor's 50 per cent renewable energy target. (Time expired)

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