Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. As you know, our country has experienced a remarkable almost quarter century of uninterrupted economic growth. Under both Labor and Liberal governments we have seen the benefits of increasing workforce participation and of course the mining boom. If we are to continue this trajectory of economic growth and rising living standards we have to face up to some big challenges—the challenges of technology disruption and what that will do to our economy and the opportunities that that presents and the ageing of the population

We have to take hold of the opportunities that we have, particularly in a region where we have a growing connectedness to Asia and where we have seen over a billion people join the middle class, who want to buy our services and the products going into that Asian marketplace.

If we are to fully capitalise on this opportunity, we need a country that is more innovative and more entrepreneurial. I want to thank the Labor member for Chifley for agreeing to work with me on policies to ensure that we make this country as innovative and entrepreneurial as possible. We need policies that will see changes in our culture so we can have a new generation of entrepreneurs prepared to take on risk, policies that will see more capital invested in our start-ups and policies that will ensure cooperation between government and higher education on commercialisation of those ideas. If we do this, we have a very bright future.