David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in this grievance debate this evening. I want to speak about an issue of great importance to our national economy and indeed to the local economy in my electorate of Banks, and that is productivity. There is no more important economic issue than productivity, and it is something that we frankly cannot talk about enough. I do have some grievances that I want to note in relation to the failure of the previous government in relation to this important policy area.

It is important to reflect for a moment on what productivity is and why it is so important. It is a word that gets thrown around quite a lot, but as in all things it can be useful to take a step back and really examine the importance of the concept. Basically, productivity matters because it is in the long run the most important source of economic growth and wealth creation in society. By 'productivity', of course, we mean making things more effectively or producing services more effectively in a given amount of time so that in the same amount of time we produce more valuable goods or services. That is a really important concept, because other sources of national wealth, like changes in the terms of trade and increases in the participation rate in the workforce, come and go and tend to ebb and flow, but productivity gains lead to sustainable wealth creation. It is quite notable that there is a very simple chart in the budget overview papers in the recent federal budget which demonstrates that the substantial majority of all growth in GDP per capita, both historically and projected into the future, is in fact driven by labour productivity. So we can never talk enough about productivity.

This government is incredibly focused on productivity-boosting measures. We help productivity growth by encouraging businesses to invest in smart ways in their business. The instant asset write-off, of course, means that businesses can be encouraged to go out there and make those expenditures on capital equipment that can help those businesses to run in a more efficient and more productive way. It also means a range of other things. It means environmental approvals. Some of our most value-added industries under the previous government were sadly tied up in all sorts of complex regulation. But, under the stewardship of the Minister for the Environment, some $1 trillion of high-value projects have been given the green light, with those environmental instances of green tape removed. It means many other things as well, including workforce retraining programs. We have the Restart program, which encourages employers to employ people over the age of 50, to get them back into the workforce. Of course, those employees have great skill and tend to be highly productive workers, and so encouraging them back into the workforce is entirely appropriate.

I would spend some time, if I had more, going through the litany of failures of the previous government in this area, but perhaps we should just reflect on one or two of their more appalling current proposals. One is to hit hundreds of thousands of Australians with a new tax on superannuation. That sends precisely the wrong message to people in my electorate of Banks and around the nation, because it basically says, 'If you do the hard work, if you do the hard yards and if you save for retirement, the government is going to move the goalposts and increase the tax on you.' It is completely inappropriate and will have a negative impact on productivity if ever implemented. Of course, we have the notorious example of the carbon tax, which smashed household budgets and caused immense uncertainty in many of the most productive sectors of the economy.

But productivity is important not only at a national level but locally, and there is nothing more important in my electorate of Banks, in the sense of building productivity, than the WestConnex project. This is a tremendous project, Mr Deputy Speaker Hawke, and I am sure that you wholeheartedly endorse it as a member for a Sydney electorate. The bottom line is that people will get places sooner. When people get places sooner, in a work context, it means they get more done. That is pretty much the definition of productivity. If you get places sooner, you spend less time doing unproductive things like sitting in the car maybe listening to the radio. You can do more work. If you can do more work in the same amount of time, that can only be a very positive thing for the local economy. The best advice from the traffic engineers is that the time to travel from Beverly Hills in my electorate to the city during peak hour will be as much as 20 minutes less, and that is a very substantial benefit.

There are some areas where further work can be done. One that particularly concerns my electorate relates to the intersection of the M5 with Belmore Road in Riverwood. The situation at present is that it is possible to enter the M5 travelling in a westerly direction or to exit it if you are coming from the west, but you cannot enter the M5 if you want to travel towards the city, and you cannot exit there if you are coming from the city. That is the case even though the land is available for those on- and off-ramps to be built. Frankly, they should be built, because the lack of the on-ramps in an easterly direction is causing significant delays to people in suburbs of my electorate like Lugarno, Peakhurst, Riverwood and Narwee. People are forced to drive through lots of back roads in a fashion which frankly is just a waste of time. It does not enable them to get onto the M5 and get to where they are going quickly. I think it is very important that this issue be addressed. I believe that it should be addressed, and I will be working very hard to do so, because I know it will help to boost productivity in our area. I am certainly encouraging the state government to take the lead on that important issue.

Another important issue that pertains to productivity in my electorate is the issue of telecommunications connectivity, and specifically mobile connectivity. There are a number of suburbs in my electorate where still, in 2015, we have great difficulty in accessing a decent mobile phone signal. This is not rural Queensland; this is right smack in the middle of Sydney. Suburbs like Connells Point and Kyle Bay have great difficulty in accessing a reliable cellular signal. The solution, of course, is for further infrastructure to be put in place. In recent months, I have spent quite some time meeting with telecommunications companies—Optus, Vodafone and Telstra—seeking to encourage them to address this very important local issue, which of course will have a very positive impact on productivity if addressed. There are many people in these suburbs who run small businesses from home and literally cannot receive a mobile telephone call. As you can imagine, that is a very difficult thing if you are trying to run a small business but nobody can call you on the mobile. I want to applaud the efforts of Vodafone and Optus. In my discussions with them, they have taken a constructive approach to this issue. I think those companies accept that more can be done to serve the residents of the Connells Point and Kyle Bay area. I know they are working on proposals at present to address this problem. Telstra—frankly—I would like to see do substantially more. The situation in Connells Point and Kyle Bay needs to be addressed and Telstra should step up and provide a better service to the residents of those areas. So productivity is extremely important, and no more so than in those important local issues in my electorate.