Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The obvious issue here is that we, as a nation, need to move towards a process that gives us the capacity to get out of the current issues pertinent to the coronavirus. This has been something that we've seen, and I believe our capacity to get out of this is going to be more determined by the skill sets of the people that we have than by the debt we take on board. Right now we are seeing the skills that will be required if we are going to utilise the most recent iteration of the government's stimulus package. I support stimulus as a mechanism to get things going, but I must say I do have concerns right now about the extent of the debt that Australia is taking on board. I note that today the amount of Australian government securities issued stands at $666.3 billion—obviously it's never been that high before—and we haven't managed to pay back any of our gross debt since about 2008, which was pertinent to the sale of Telstra at that time.

We have to be careful of this, because obviously this debt is going to be incumbent upon those who come after us. We have a responsibility to those people to make sure that we do what is necessary but absolutely no more than is required. However, on this component, we have to see that the establishment of the National Skills Commissioner is a critical new piece of Australia's economic infrastructure and a vital element of the Prime Minister's recently announced JobMaker plan. This, I believe, also goes to the Prime Minister's sentiment, which is something I agree with, about the innate capacity of the Australian economy to rebuild itself rather than being reliant on stimulus actions, especially in areas where you can't really see it adding to the general capacity and growth of the economic platform of Australia.

The growth of the economic platform would be better suited to the construction of such things as dams, railway lines, roads and power stations, especially power stations that produce affordable power, such as coal-fired power. Those are the sorts of things that would give us the capacity to find people who have the pertinent skills and give them a job. Obviously, cheap power is one of the ultimate food stocks for having a manufacturing centre and having the capacity for people, especially those in blue-collar jobs, to have a job.

It is timely that we address the critical challenges of managing the health and economic impacts, especially after COVID-19. The COVID-19 issue has brought things such as this into clear focus. As Sir Leo Hielscher so aptly put it, an economy that has taken us years and decades to build up was put at risk in merely a few weeks of a pandemic that, to be frank, no-one really foresaw. It gave us a very strong lesson of where the strengths and weaknesses of our domestic economy lie. Our domestic economy has to be broadened and has to be strengthened away from the pre-eminence of the service sector. The belief that all economies will work freely and will be able to cover the holes of their own inadequacies with imports has been stringently tested and has left us wanting in so many areas. It was best explained with the requirements for personal protective equipment.

The National Skills Commissioner will help ensure the skills and training systems support all Australians, including vulnerable cohorts, in facing the challenge of working out how to live, work and retrain in a way that creates a sustainable COVID-safe economy. A COVID-safe economy is one that obviously has the capacity to build on the requirements that are needed in an issue such as a pandemic. Together with the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment (Governance and Other Matters) Bill 2020, this bill delivers the same key elements of the 2019 expert review of the Australian VET system, led by the Hon. Steven Joyce. With a name like that, one would have to say that he would be an eminent person and obviously supremely qualified to do his job—and, like all Joyces, he is to be found at the centre of all controversies!

The commissioner will examine the cost drivers and develop and maintain a set of efficient prices for VET courses to improve transparency, consistency and accessibility for students. But more and more we have to be absolutely certain that a person's future is not reliant on them just being able to go to university. More and more, especially in the age of the internet, the services that are the most resilient are the ones that actually require a person to be there to do them. As I've said so many times, if you can do it at a keyboard, you can do it from any corner of the globe; it doesn't have to be done from Australia. We're seeing that now more and more with back-office work. Whether it's for accountants, whether it's for engineers or whether it's for any form of drafting, or even where there's a common-law principle, these jobs can be done overseas. In many instances, they are done overseas much, much more cheaply than they can be done in Australia.

To get further resilience into jobs that can only be performed in Australia by Australians, we obviously have to focus on trades, which takes me back to the point: if you're going to have an economy that has a future in trades and a future in manufacturing, it has to have one of the primary sources of delivering that, which is cheap power—because the alternative to cheap power is cheap wages, and people don't want cheap wages. They want a certain standard of living, so we have to find our competitive advantage in something that we can deliver, which in the past was the cheapest power in the world. Now, unfortunately, we have the dearest power in the world.

I commend the so-called 'big stick' legislation, which was something that we discussed with Prime Minister Turnbull at the time, especially in our dealings with AGL. We want to make sure that we understand that one of the fundamental reasons that you'll have an economy and people working at such places as the Gladstone smelter is if we have cheap power. If you have dear power, that smelter closes down and those jobs go.

I will leave it there. I'd like to commend the wider aspects of the bill. I believe that you can see it in no better form than what's in this chamber at present and the way this chamber has been operating. I must say that, for me, parliament during the COVID time is like parliament in a fog. It's hard to actually get the proper grasp of what we're doing. I think we're becoming more and more attached to what we do in our electorates, which is fine, but Canberra as an article of parliament is becoming more and more distant—or it certainly is for me. I've noted that in recent times I've managed to lose a lot of weight as I go back to doing things such as fencing and cattle work and mustering. The longer you do that, the less relevant this place seems to become in your life.

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