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

I will speak briefly about the Australian Business Growth Fund Bill 2019, but not so briefly that you cannot call a quorum on me!

Australia is a very interesting country. We have never had an abundance of capital and we have never had an abundance of risk capital. It is for this reason that when we look at the top 20 companies the United States has by capitalisation, all of them bar one were founded or started after 1975. In Australia, when we look at our top 20 companies by capitalisation, the youngest of those companies—the one that was founded at the latest date—was Woolworths in 1928. When we think about the challenges facing our economy at the moment, which the Labor Party points out to us on a regular basis, it is normally the case that we have seen productivity growth halve since the time of the Howard government due to the onerous and negligent laws introduced by the Gillard-Rudd government that have so tied up our corporations and financial service companies in red tape, ensuring that they do not have the ability or the capacity to allocate capital in our economy as efficiently and as effectively as we would otherwise want them to have.

The result of this has been that, because productivity has been lower, we have seen that real wages have been lower. Because productivity has been lower, consumers have suffered because we have not seen the formation of new companies. We have seen an increase in the barriers to entry for new corporations. Consumers do not get the innovation in products and services that they would normally have because of the fact that there are no new companies coming into the market. If Apple had been founded in Australia it would never have got off the ground because of the laws and policies that the Labor Party have inflicted upon the people and the economy of Australia. And we need to understand that the same would go for Google, the same would go for Microsoft and the same would go for a whole raft of companies that have created untold wealth, products and services for individuals everywhere across the world.

It is interesting that Australia's most famous and probably most successful IT company is a little company called Atlassian, founded by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks. When they came to the point of listing that company, they didn't choose Australia to list that company in; they chose the Nasdaq in the United States. We have companies, like Palantir, which have had to move large parts of their workforce to the United States because of the tax laws introduced by 'Chairman Swan' when he was Treasurer of this country. This meant that no-one wanted to start an employee share scheme.

So we have the so-called party of the workers ensuring that when the people who were working hard to make these companies as successful as they are, who were putting their intellectual nous and all that they had into the starting of these companies and the success that they were—and the founders wanted to share that success; they wanted to share the upside of their ventures, their ideas, their sweat and their labour—that it couldn't happen. They must go outside this chamber and hang their heads in shame at the damage they have done to Australian workers in this country.

But now the Liberal Party is the party of the worker, because we care about people getting a fair share of what they put into the work and effort that they put into their companies. This bill is only necessary because of the onerous financial service regulations introduced by the Labor Party, which, by the way, did not help consumers. In fact, they did quite the opposite. There was more harm at the hands of financial service companies under the Labor Party than there has ever been under the Liberal Party! They had Trio and Storm Financial—and that's just two!

And we don't have to go far back to the Victorian government under John Cain. They had the State Bank of Victoria that at one point made every Victorian poorer than your average citizens of some very developing countries. That's what you get under the Labor Party. This bill is necessary because we need to free up risk capital in Australia, and I recommend this bill to this House in the unamended form.

Debate interrupted.

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