Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the government's national economic plan? How will re-establishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission boost economic growth, deliver more jobs and improve productivity in the workplace?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. We took our national economic plan to the election, and we won the election. We took to the election a carefully considered set of measures which we know will deliver the economic growth and the opportunities our children and grandchildren deserve. The Labor Party, on the other hand, went to the election with an antibusiness, higher tax, higher debt, antigrowth agenda which would inevitably have restricted the opportunities, shrunk the horizon, for our children and our grandchildren—the ones for whom we should care the most.

We promised middle income tax cuts and we have delivered them—more than half a million middle-class Australians will be paying 32½ per cent tax instead of going up into the higher 37 per cent tax bracket. We are pursuing thousands of export opportunities for Australian businesses. We are continuing to open up new opportunities for our exports. We have seen, just in the last week, the signing of the new expanded Singapore-Australia Free Trade Agreement, building on the deals with China, Korea and Japan. We know that this is going to be, in Singapore, a big win for our services sector—education, engineering, accounting, legal services. Singapore is the financial hub of South-East Asia, and we now have the access to it that Australian businesses need.

And, we are standing up to union thuggery. The construction sector employs a million Australians. It is vital to our economic prospects. Its efficiency, its lawfulness, determines the cost of everything we build, whether it is a road, whether it is a school, whether it is a dam, whether it is a hospital or whether it is an apartment building which a young couple may want to buy their first home in. All of that is determined by whether the rule of law prevails—and we know it does not. And we know why it does not. The thuggery we see is having a massive cost. Consider, just today, reports of the CFMEU's unlawful action, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost to projects in Queensland, including the Sunshine Coast University Hospital project costing Lend Lease up to $100,000 a day. Who pays for that? The taxpayer. Who suffers reduced services? Citizens. We are standing up for the rule of law as part of our national economic plan to drive jobs and growth, and we call on those opposite to join us in securing our future.