Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I always love a great debate on economic management, especially against the Labor Party, because it is just like falling through the looking glass into a parallel universe. They stand up here and they say 'We need economic growth. And do you know why we need economic growth? So we can take more money from people who've created that growth. That's what we need.' They're all about division. They're all about taking, they're all about destroying, with not one single word about creating. It may strike the member for Dobell as extraordinary, but there are people in my electorate who have to travel three or four hours a day to get to work, too. There are people right across Australia who make sacrifices to get to work. And what do we give them for all the effort that they put into that? We tax them. We tax them so that they can fund social welfare programs that, according to the member for Fenner, have failed. I'm here to tell the member for Fenner that they haven't failed. Inequality is going down under this government. Inequality is at a record low in Australia because of the policies of this government. This government is about growing the cake, not spending all its time trying to divide and shrink the cake or telling one group of Australians that they should dislike the other group of Australians, because there's more that they can take from them.

This government is about building. The party I belong to is all about hope; the party on that side is all about nope. That's what we get. They should be coming into this chamber and thanking us. Since this government was elected 1,100 jobs have been created per day, but do they care about that? No. All they're worried about is, 'Why can't we get more tax from those people who have jobs, so we can give more away?' They're not worried about people; the only times they're worried about people is when they're not getting enough taxes out of them, when they need their votes or when they force them to join a union. The Labor Party is the party of division. It cannot cope with the success story of Australia. It never has and never will. The truth of the matter is that this government knows that governments don't grow economies, create wealth or, by and large, make things better. Governments need to get out of the way, because Australians make our economy and our country great—not union officials or social welfare programs; people. The ordinary Australians—

Ms McBride interjecting—

decried by the member for Dobell, who get up at 5 am, go to work, work hard, and then go home and look after their kids, are the people the Liberal Party has always supported and always will support, often in the face of the Labor Party's trenchant opposition. Just today we heard they're going to play games over the TPP. Why? Because they can. Is there one skerrick of policy rationale for what they're doing? Absolutely not; they have no idea what they're talking about. Free trade has created more wealth than any other single policy in the history of humanity. For 50 years we followed their recipe of government funded foreign and development aid to try to shift global poverty. You want to know what happened? We spent a lot of money on bureaucrats achieving absolutely nothing. In three decades of free trade 2.1 billion people have been lifted out of global poverty—the sort of poverty where you have to decide whether you want a meal for yourself or one for your kids.

That's the type of policy the Labor Party is opposed to. Why? So they can play politics. Why else? So they can lie to people, tell them that their jobs will be worse off, and run industrial campaigns claiming things are going to get worse when we all know that things are going to get better. How do we know that? Because Australia at the moment has a faster growth rate—you may be interested in growth; that's the thing that creates jobs and wealth for you blokes to tax so you can transfer it to someone else. Then you can carry on and say how inequality is getting worse when in fact inequality is at a 75-year low. The Labor Party should get on board with this government's economic management, because we're making things happen and you're destroying people's lives.

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