James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the shadow Treasurer's second reading amendment and commend his contribution on behalf of the coalition on the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 to the House. As he articulated, we indeed do not support this legislation whatsoever. It is completely against the DNA of the Liberal Party and, frankly, where modern Australia has been heading for decades and decades. From the government, this is all about politics. From memory, we saw the Prime Minister announce this policy just after the Dunkley by-election up in Brisbane in a speech about a future made in Australia. Whilst we're only debating this legislation in this chamber right now, the government has already been out there picking their winners and selecting businesses that are going to get special treatment and the largesse of the government if this legislation passes through the parliament.

Of course, the principles of the Liberal Party are very simple and very clear when it comes to the management of our economy. We want government to be as small as it can be; we want taxes to be as low as they possibly can; we want everyone to be on a level, equal playing field; we want businesses to be encouraged to take risks, to put their capital on the line; we want capital to go where the market determines that it should go, where the best ideas and the best opportunities within our economy are; and we want those businesses to be paying the lowest possible tax to give them the best chance to succeed. We don't want businesses to be making different decisions than they otherwise would have made because a government policy skews them, skews where the money flows, skews the benefit in the economy from one particular industry to another particular industry, from one particular business to another particular business, from one type of activity in the economy to another type of activity in the economy. What we have in this bill is exactly that: attempts to dramatically interfere with the sensible, natural market forces; natural, merit based decision-making; and the success and failure of good and bad ideas in a free market, capitalist economy. In the coalition we will defend those principles very strongly, very bitterly at every opportunity we get. The opportunity before us today is to speak against this bill and to seek to defeat this bill.

Ever since the Second World War, there has been an international consensus that there is a need to have open economies and open markets and that doing so not only leads to economic prosperity but also stops wars from happening, because a lot of the tensions that led to many of the conflicts in the preceding centuries, particularly the First and Second World Wars, were about locked-up markets, an inability of different economies to trade with and access other economies, and those economies having no interlinking whatsoever, so that, when tensions and pressures got to a certain point, the only course taken was that of warfare and bloodshed. The consensus that emerged at the end of the Second World War, particularly learning from the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, was that we needed to have an international framework of open markets and low tariffs and let economies trade with other economies, produce what they were good at producing, sell the surplus of that produce because they were the best at making it, and, equally, import products that were more competitive from other economies.

Australia has been a great beneficiary of those fundamental principles, because our economic prosperity and success, as a nation of nearly 27 million people, come from exporting our surplus product. We have a trade surplus, beyond question. It is not disputed that we earn more money selling to other countries than we spend buying product from other countries, and there are not a lot of countries that can say that. For us, that's because industries, particularly in the resources sector and the agricultural sector, produce an enormous surplus and sell that into other economies, and they have benefited from the fact that we have an international trading regime that has brought tariffs down in the decades since the GATT and, more recently, the WTO frameworks were put in place. People can invest with confidence in our competitive advantages in our own economy, and they can sell that surplus to great profit.

I am, frankly, concerned about what other countries are doing, which the government is citing as examples to be followed, because we're going backwards on the metric of open, free markets. Now we have a variety of economies around the world saying, 'Let's get back into subsidisation, protectionism, government interference and government intervention in economies.' It is a very dangerous path to go down. If we've learnt nothing from history about what that leads to, I deeply lament that, because we know where we will end up. For Australia in particular, which has a massive trade surplus, the consequence of our participating in and encouraging a return to dramatic protectionism and trade barriers is going to be a collapse in our standard of living in this country.

When the Treasurer handed down the budget, it became clearer and clearer that this policy is all about politics and the next election. The best example of that is that in the appropriation for this policy is a $45 million taxpayer advertising campaign. If this is a great set of policies and a great idea for the nation, why is it that the government has to spend $45 million on an advertising campaign to tell people that it's great? I might add that the key measures in this bill are not ones that involve consumers having to make any decisions or do anything at all. Why would you have to have a television ad in the middle of the AFL Grand Final talking about the Future Made in Australia when everything to do with this suite of policies involves industry and business decision-making? Why would anyone need to learn about that when they're watching the television after getting home from work? The only reason is that the government are using this to try and look like they have an economic agenda and a plan for the future of our economy. It is very regrettable that such a spectacular amount of taxpayer resources is being put on the line through this legislation, purely to try and concoct an argument and create the mirage that there is an economic agenda underpinning what this government is doing.

The facts and the reality are very much the reverse. Australians have never done it tougher. They have never found it more difficult to make the household budget ends meet, and people are making difficult decisions and sacrifices because their mortgages, rents and power bills are going up. That's not just happening to Australian families; it's happening to Australian businesses. This government has a policy to pick winners and dole out taxpayer funds to particular businesses. If you say to a business, 'We'd love to give you tens of millions of dollars,' they will take it. Of course they will. They will probably also agree to be at a press conference, put a hard hat and a high-vis vest on you, stand next to you and say, 'This is a fantastic policy for my business.' It's no surprise that the businesses getting millions of dollars through this program would say that it's a good thing.

People that are interested in the broader economy—like, I don't know, the Productivity Commission, helmed by someone appointed by this government; and senior, significant, respected economists—have a very different view. They have the same concerns that I've just outlined, about a government that is using taxpayer funds to pick winners, concoct press conferences and run television ads in the lead-up to an election. The consequence is that the money that is being spent on this program is coming out of the pockets of Australian families and off the P&L of Australian businesses. Every dollar, let alone the billions of dollars in this program, that is spent on picking winners means that taxes have to be higher for everyone else.

There are not many economists or economy-wide industry groups that will tell you that, as it is, it's easy to meet the high costs of doing business in this country. That's not just taxes. It includes taxes, but it's all the other inputs that businesses have to face: power bills, payroll taxes and local government charges. All the different costs of doing business are very significant in this country. If you wanted to help manufacturers, and you asked a fair spread of manufacturers what we could do to help them, they would say: 'Try and get our costs down. Help us get our costs down.' An individual manufacturing business might say, 'Yes, I'm more than happy to take tens of millions of dollars from you if you want to give it to me,' but, if you put all the businesses together, who are obviously not collectively getting tens of billions of dollars, they will say: 'Can you cut my power bill for me? Can you help get other input costs down?'

We're out there competing against economies with much lower electricity charges. I worked in a manufacturing business for a long time. We had one plant in Adelaide and a replica plant doing exactly the same thing in Suzhou, China. We were running the exact same business in two jurisdictions, and the input costs were the difference. As much as labour costs in other countries are, of course, always going to be lower than in Australia—and we're not seeking to dispute the excellent higher living standards and higher real wages in this country—power bills shouldn't be any more expensive in Australia than for our major competitors. When you're competing in manufacturing and your major input is your power bill, why don't we do something about getting power prices down in this country? The opposite is occurring. This bill, and the expenditure of billions of dollars on this 'picking winners' strategy to try and convince people in the lead-up to the election that there is an economic plan, pales into insignificance if there were an actual plan from this government to help get business costs down like electricity generation.

There are fundamental principles at stake here. I've talked about the position of the coalition. Obviously the government is bringing forward something that is against the DNA of our party. There is an opportunity for members in this chamber to reflect deeply on going down this path. What we're doing is supporting those that are already going down this path and encouraging our major competitors to do the same thing. This is us contributing to a global trend to re-protect and to put barriers and walls back around economies across the planet. Looking at the ABS statistics on trade: effectively, if you want to measure the impact on the Australian economy of that, just remove our trade surplus completely from our current GDP, and from the living standards that that currently supports for every single Australian.

I know the government don't want to bring back protectionism. I acknowledge the Hawke and Keating governments' work on recognising and understanding the benefit to Australia and our economy in getting rid of trade barriers rather than bringing them back. But once we get into the business of doling out big licks of taxpayer funds to the businesses that we like and that we want to help compete against other businesses, there will only be retaliation against that. We won't be the winners of that. The end of that cycle just means a reduction in global trade. As a nation of 27 million people, we are absolutely dependent on producing more in this country than we consume and selling the surplus to other nations to grow and expand our wealth. There was a consensus on those fundamental principles from both major parties thanks to the changes that Hawke and Keating achieved within their own party's attitudes to those things. Now we have a situation through this bill where one of the two major parties is reversing their position on the open markets, free trade and global competition that has a demonstrated record of success for the Australian economy. I urge the House to defeat this bill.

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