Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are in a cost-of-living crisis, and the Prime Minister has been distracted. I think that's pretty obvious. When governments put in business-unfriendly policies—that is, when they make it harder to do business in this nation—then the costs go up. And when the costs go up, those costs are passed on to consumers and the cost-of-living crisis gets worse. It's a supply-and-demand truism. It's one of those sort of scientific propositions that's hard to argue with—a bit like the fact that aluminium doesn't rust!

The Prime Minister is allowing some ministers to do some things that are damaging business and damaging the economy. That's what I am hearing in my electorate. One example is energy policy. Less exploration for gas means less gas and higher costs. If you don't have as much of something then the cost of what's left goes up. When businesses have to use that then they pass the costs on to the consumer. That's the cost of living. I got a lower electricity bill recently—and many of my constituents did that too. It's because we put on rooftop solar. I did that under the previous coalition government, so people can't come in here and say that nothing happened in the past nine years. A lot of rooftop solar went on. That saved a lot of people's electricity costs, and it reduced emissions by a lot. I saw the previous government do a lot in that area.

In industrial relations, again, it's a confusing, complex system that the minister is proposing to put in. Businesses are telling me that they're going to have to put on more people and they're going to have to pay more. They're going to have more bureaucracy, less productivity and more red tape, leading to a higher cost of doing business. What are they going to do? They're going to pass that on to the consumer, and the cost-of-living crisis is going to get worse.

These are things that are in the pipeline now, but you ain't seen anything yet. You know that song from the seventies, 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet'? It's by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Well, 'Business Destruction Overdrive' is the name of the government's band! You ain't seen nothing yet. Here's something you're going to regret. We are going to regret the dreadful policy around the Murray-Darling Basin Plan that passed this place—the worst stuff I've ever seen a parliament do—because, if you take something away from business, there'll be less of it, the cost of their inputs is going to go up, and they're going to have to pass that on.

There are things that we can choose to buy, but there are things that we have to buy, and we have to buy food. If you take away Australia's ability to grow food, and a lot of it is grown in my electorate—apples, peaches, milk, cheese—if you take away Australian farmers' ability to grow that because you wreck the business model by pushing one of the inputs too high then when Australians who don't live in my electorate go into the supermarket and have a look around at the fresh produce the prices are going to be up, or, even worse, the produce is going to be imported from another country. People might say: 'That's alright. Maybe it'll be a bit cheaper.' Yes, but it will put everyone in my electorate out of a job. So how do you think the cost-of-living crisis is going to go when they don't have a job?

Seriously, if you want to approach the cost-of-living crisis, let businesses operate productively. We've seen them do it before. It's what this country was built on. It's what my electorate was built on. People have been coming from all over the world to put some capital in and have a serious crack at creating a business. The best governments have got out of their way and said, 'We'll put a framework in, but we reckon you, the private sector, know how to operate a really productive, globally competitive business that supplies great things to people here in Australia at a reasonable cost.' But, no, this government are saying, 'We're going to make it harder for you to do business. We're going to increase your costs of doing business,' and therefore what's going to happen? The cost of business will go up, the prices of the things that they're selling to us will go up, and the cost-of-living crisis will get worse.

In this parliament we talk about child care and all sorts of stuff—and that's good—but let's focus on letting business do business.

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