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

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on what action the government is taking to make Australian businesses more competitive, grow the economy and create more local jobs? Is the Prime Minister aware of any alternative approaches?

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

I thank the honourable member for his question. Nearly 1,000 jobs have been created every day over the last year—a thousand new jobs a day—as a direct result of our pro-growth, pro-investment, pro-business policies. We support the policies that make Australian businesses more competitive. Why is that? Because the overwhelming majority of Australians—86 per cent, in fact—are employed by private business. Ten and a half million Australians are employed in the private sector, so, plainly, it is in our interest, our national interest, to ensure that Australian businesses are strong and competitive.

The tax cuts that we negotiated through the Senate for small and medium businesses with turnovers of up to $50 million a year are enabling those companies to invest more and employ more, and, collectively, these businesses—overwhelmingly Australian family owned businesses—employ half the Australian private sector workforce. So what we're doing is we're backing business, backing investment and getting more employment. That is what we're delivering.

And we're backing our manufacturers and big energy users by cutting the cost of power and improving reliability through the National Energy Guarantee. We're opening up big new markets for our exporters, for agriculture and services, with new and enhanced export deals. That is the key to growth.

Who could be opposed to this? Seriously, who could be opposed to this? I don't have to look far. It's the Leader of the Opposition. You would think that this would be bipartisan, and yet in reports today in the press, in a Miranda Devine article, we hear what we've long suspected—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

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

No, this is the Leader of the Opposition—this is your leader—at the BCA. He told the Business Council of Australia to expect nothing from a Shorten Labor government because, as one of the attendees is reported as saying, he thinks a class war will be good for Labor. He obviously didn't hold those views when he was cosying up to billionaires in Melbourne, doing special deals to short-change his members. I don't think he was running this class-war line when he went to visit Mr Huang in Mosman—or perhaps he might have been. Who knows? You never know. He'll say anything to please his audience. The reality is he has no consistency in his support for investment. Labor has not one policy which would encourage one business to invest one dollar or hire one more employee. He wants to smash the economy with a $164 billion tax grab. He wants to increase energy prices. He talks about targeting millionaires—well, he's only ever targeted them to suck up to them.