Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Throughout the last century, one of the great debates that was linked to bloody conflict was around the role of government. It's one of the great debates because it affects peoples lives—which path you take: whether you want more government or you want less government. When we look at the great movements in the last century for dragging people out of poverty, for lifting prosperity, all of the other advances in human technology, all of the metrics that make life worth living, we see that most have been not because of government but in the absence of government.

You can view power in one of two ways. You can view the success of the nation through the success of the government, and it is the size and the power and the resources of the government that can drive you. That's one view. Another view is that your measure of success is the absence of government. It is the small business, the family and the private sector, and their success is our success, driven by their ingenuity and their ability to solve problems, to put capital where it needs to be put and to incentivise labour in the way that it should be incentivised. These aren't just abstract theories that we talk about at political conferences or in the classroom. They are central to the great movement of taking people from poverty into prosperity. It is at the heart of this nation being where it is today. It is at the absolute heart.

So when we come to this place, whether we are Liberal or Labor, it is important to ask these questions: Do you want to democratise power or centralise it? Do you want to democratise prosperity or centralise it? They're important questions because it is in our DNA and our human nature to want to centralise things. You don't have to be a particular leader with an ego. That's just what power does. It coalesces around other power. That's what prosperity does. It must be resisted, and it must be resisted for very important reasons, because we need to resist it now more than ever. The Intergenerational report notes that Commonwealth government spending per person in 2023 was $25,000. Accounting for inflation, using that 2023 dollar mark, that report has that number going to $40,000 per person. That is a weight that the nation cannot bear, particularly if, in the absence of productivity growth, the median wage is going to be about $65,000 and the average wage is $95,000. It's unsustainable. What we haven't seen from this government are the productivity gains to offset that.

In the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024 and in the Net Zero Economy Authority (Transitional Provisions) Bill 2024, we are seeing the creation of an agency, the Net Zero Economy Authority, that will have several functions that will concentrate power, concentrate bureaucracy and not address the substance of the issue that there is bipartisan support for. This authority will coordinate net zero policy and planning across government. It will facilitate both government and private participation and investment and support affected workers, including First Nations Australians, to participate in the transition. It also has a role to deliver educational and promotional initiatives. With many bills that come before this place, if you just open up the objectives, they are usually drafted in a way that reasonable people can agree with those objectives. But the devil is always in the detail—the unintended or the intended consequences that will flow from that and will have significant impact on peoples' lives.

There are two broad aspects to this legislation about these powers. The first power is that it will facilitate new investment in the net zero transition. It will operate as a shopfront, for want of a better word. It will seek to work with project advocates and state governments to get renewable projects to investment decision. Again, it's a government-knows-best view, and we've seen where that goes. We've seen how that movie plays out. Like many families in Australia, I was quite glad to get the NBN and use it. But no-one has to be a technology or communications engineer to know that that technology will quickly fade, and we're seeing that. The government didn't have anything to do with Starlink and Elon Musk, but that's already an alternative to that monumentally expensive project. But here we are. There is a great risk in centralising this one-stop shopfront that knows best. We are going into an area that is about not just other technologies but technologies that are linked to the most fundamental input into business after capital and labour, being energy. They're the three big inputs for anyone running a business: capital, labour and energy. This authority covers all three, and not necessarily for good.

The second responsibility of the authority is in assisting the impacted workers in the transition through the Energy Industry Jobs Plan. When there's change, there are those who are left behind. That happens. That happens all the time. It is important that—whether it is through training, other opportunities or just the initiative of the individuals involved—there are other opportunities out there for them. Like when we transitioned from a horse and cart transport sector to the combustion engine, that happened without the government working out what to do. The big oil companies put petrol stations up. They did that without much help from the government because they saw an opportunity, they saw a need and they reacted. That's how the process works; it's how it's supposed to work. For some reason, we are reinventing all of those lessons over many decades.

Where did this come from? Where did this newfound love of government knowing best come from? It's an old idea and a dangerous idea, but it's one that the Treasurer quite clearly articulated in his previous summer's essay where he put a kite up to show that whilst he might admire Paul Keating he doesn't, in his actions, follow his commitment to the non-government sector driving prosperity forward. In fact the essay sought to reinvent capitalism. That is quite disturbing and will have consequences, because the Treasurer is seeking to reinvent capitalism. Again, point to an example in history or around the world where many, many other leaders and political parties—whether they were democratic or otherwise, and they're usually not democratic—have sought to reinvent capitalism. How did that turn out? How has it gone for those countries? How has it gone when government seeks to pick winners? Again, when government knows best.

What special skill and expertise is in this building that knows better than Australians out there who are taking the risks, who are putting their own capital forward and putting their own house on the line? Why do we think that we know better? It is hubris, it is absolute arrogance.

The other issue with this bill is that it is a wolf in sheep's clothing. There are industrial relations impacts contained within this bill that have not been properly spoken about. They haven't been frank with the public and they haven't been frank with those who either run a small or medium business, or who aspire to, about the extra burden and layer that's about to be put on them.

We will oppose this bill for several reasons. Fundamentally, it is a philosophical difference and objection to the role of government that we believe in democratising power. That's an admirable thing because it means are we in this place for ourselves or for the nation. It's about democratising prosperity, and there's humility to that. Do we know better, or do we trust Australian ingenuity, Australian risk-takers and Australians who work hard to know better, particularly those in the regions. And because this bill disproportionately affects regional businesses, I do listen to my Nationals colleagues and my regional Liberal colleagues. I don't represent a regional seat, but that's the point. Because I don't represent a regional seat, who am I to tell my good friends in the Nationals and my good friends in regional Liberal areas what they should be doing? And it goes both ways. I wouldn't ask you to tell a metropolitan member what we should do in Melbourne, even though some do. That's the purpose of this place. There are 151 seats, each little bit of Australia broken up and represented. Through their voices, we get to the better decisions. So, when the regional and rural members, through our friends in the Nationals and our party, are telling us that this is going to hit the regions particularly hard, we should listen. I listen. The government benches should listen.

This is another example of Labor's haphazard approach to industrial policy. There's only so much that Australian businesses can take. Every corner of this country is doing it tough, but there are some that are doing it tougher than others. In my state of Victoria, small and medium businesses are doing it particularly tough. There is a churn to businesses. Some will go; some won't survive. That happens. It's part of the process. But there has consistently been, more often than not, an aggregate increase. What we know is that, last financial year, the only state not to have an aggregate increase was Victoria. In an aggregate sense, 7,600 businesses left our state. Again, my good friend the member for Herbert is from Queensland. They had an increase of 11,000 businesses. I have heard many Queensland members tell me about the Victorians that have moved north to set up business there. So, if you want to have a good look at what the future looks like with a Labor dominated government, go to the history of a Labor dominated state government. That's your looking glass into the future. To those small business owners and those medium business owners, I say: you need help, not further burdens from a bill like this.

There are those who will look at the title of this and make the usual calls about who is standing strong on climate change or not. That is a dishonest view of this. It's a straw man argument. Australians want us to solve the problems that matter to them in a serious way. Engaging in those sorts of straw man arguments—and we've seen them particularly from the Greens political party—is not in the interests of our economy and our society. This transition is happening. It is a difficult one that's happening around the world. There's bipartisan support for it. But we have to ask ourselves: What has changed from all of the lessons, particularly in the last century, where we have learned that the top-down government-knows-best approach isn't going to solve it? What has changed that we think we can flip the script on that? I enjoyed the Treasurer's essay, but the answer isn't there. I enjoyed his reading his PhD on Paul Keating, and the answer certainly wasn't there. So we ask the government: Why do you think you can reinvent capitalism? Why do you think that you know best over Australians? Why do you think we should not, wherever we can, democratise power, democratise prosperity and, in doing so, put the interests of Australians before ourselves, because that is needed more than ever.

See this speech in context