Ross Hart (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm always very pleased to return to my electorate in northern Tasmania, especially after the always eventful sitting weeks in Canberra. Upon my return to Tasmania the week before last, I went doorknocking in West Launceston. I don't need an opinion poll to tell me about the issues that are important in northern Tasmania; I hear them on the door steps every day. I heard them loud and clear in the months leading up to the election on 2 July 2016. These issues are jobs, well-paid jobs that people can rely upon, jobs that enable people to play a real part in our communities; education, so that our children can play their part in building Tasmania and Australia; communities which are strong and resilient, so that the workforce is able to cope with a demanding future; and, finally, but not least, health. Our communities know how important our public healthcare system is.

Labor established Medicare. We understand the importance of being able to access GPs through our world-class universal healthcare system. We also understand that our healthcare system is an integrated system, with access to GPs as primary healthcare providers and our world-class public hospital system providing acute care, with a host of specialists and allied health providers supporting the system both in the primary- and acute-care models. We took a lot of flak after the 2016 election campaign, particularly from a petulant Prime Minister on election night, for daring to suggest that Medicare was under attack from the Liberals, but even the Liberals know that Medicare plays an important part in the life of every Australian. That is why the Liberals have taken the extraordinary step of passing legislation to, supposedly, guarantee Medicare. This is despite the Liberals continuing their freeze on the Medicare rebate whilst claiming that it is unfrozen. Try seeing a GP or specialist in northern Tasmania to test the proposition that the Liberals have unfrozen the Medicare rebate freeze. Labor knows—everyone knows—that the unfreezing of the Medicare rebate is a con, timed to coincide with the next federal election. It was the federal Liberals that cut funding to our healthcare system by failing to provide for increased demand and acuity, but it was the Tasmanian state Liberals led by Will Hodgman who stood idly by and failed to do anything about it. The state and federal Liberals are more interested in their own petty internal squabbles than standing up for the state of Tasmania.

The Prime Minister has postponed any action with respect to the distribution of the GST, which is vital to services in Tasmania like our health budget, until after the Tasmanian and South Australian elections. The fact that the Tasmanian Liberal Premier and the Treasurer are not complaining publicly about this tells us the truth of the matter: the Tasmanian Liberals are too weak and ineffective to argue the state's case for retaining our share of GST.

But the Liberal Party's disdain for Tasmania goes much further. Just the last sitting week, the member for New England, in his previous role as Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, was asked in a series of questions about infrastructure, in particular, the woeful underspend within that portfolio and the lack of new infrastructure projects within my home state of Tasmania. The former Deputy Prime Minister must have had other matters on his mind because his answer referred to the coalition's commitment to, of all things, inland rail—you just couldn't make it up! Any infrastructure projects in fact referred to by the member for New England were projects commenced under the state and federal Labor governments.

Federal Labor is a friend to Tasmania. Labor understands the importance of transforming our Tasmanian economy through investment in education, in particular TAFE and higher education, where Tasmania has historically underperformed. The federal Liberals cut over $80 million from schools in Tasmania whilst appropriating to themselves a commitment to education. What did we hear from Will Hodgman's government? Nothing. Silence. Nothing at all.

Tasmanians deserve a government that will stand up for them and fight for them in Canberra. This weekend Tasmanian voters will go to the polls faced with a choice: another four years of a weak and ineffectual Liberal government or a Rebecca White majority Labor government fighting for the interests of Tasmania. The difference could not be more obvious. The Hodgman Liberal government created the health crisis that we are currently facing in Tasmania, cutting $210 million from health in their budget and standing idly by when the Prime Minister cut millions more. Waiting times have blown out. Ambulances are ramped at all hours of the day and night, and our health professionals are struggling in an under-resourced system.

Under a Rebecca White majority state Labor government, health will be the No. 1 priority. Labor's Better Health Plan will keep Tasmanians healthier for longer, treated faster and returned home to their families sooner. This investment will support the opening of more hospital beds and employ up to 500 health professionals, including offering: 100 more graduate nurse positions, 20 hospital doctors, 25 paramedics and fund 32 GP internships. Labor will build the capacity of the health workforce steadily over the next six years. This will allow for more beds, more medical treatment, more elective surgery, shorter emergency wait times, and better ambulance response times.

The Hodgman Liberal government has an equally dismal record on jobs for Tasmania as it does on health. We know that full-time jobs have fallen since the election of this government and that in some regions youth unemployment is as high as 20 per cent, leaving a generation of young Tasmanian people without opportunity. Rather than standing up for hardworking low-paid workers, the state Liberals instead welcomed the decision to cut penalty rates, proving, once again, they lack the credentials to fight for vulnerable Tasmanians when it counts. Their record too on education is just as concerning—cutting pathway planners from schools, mismanaging TAFE, and making a disastrous attempt to lower the school starting age for Tasmanian children.

A Tasmania Labor government will strive towards making Tasmania the education state, delivering $63 million in extra funding to provide Tasmanian schools with more than 300 new teachers and education support staff. Labor has listened to families and listened to students and educators, and is committed to delivering a quality education plan to repair the damage done by the Hodgman Liberal government. Only a majority Labor government will remove compulsory school fees from public schools. Nationally, federal Labor will put back what the Liberals have cut. We have a plan to ensure that proper needs-based funding is reinstated, working in conjunction with the states.

Time and time again, meeting people while door-knocking, in the street, or in my electorate office, I hear how hard it is for ordinary, everyday Australians to get ahead, despite the fact that they may be in work. Those ordinary Tasmanians feel that they are not participating in the 'better times' that Will Hodgman and co tell us that the state of Tasmania is experiencing. Perhaps it is the fact that no Liberals have protested the cuts to penalty rates and no Liberals have argued for decent wage growth. Instead, we hear about a plan for economic growth based upon handing out $65 billion worth of tax cuts to the top end of town.

It is the Labor Party that carries the torch in Canberra for fairer outcomes for ordinary Australians, the people who are ignored and left behind by the Liberals. And it will be the Labor Party that delivers a better future for Tasmanians. We understand that the way to improve the life of most Australians is not to give a $65 billion tax cut to the big corporates. We understand, on this side of the House, that education transforms lives. We understand that we must ensure that our world-class universal healthcare system is supported and enhanced. We put the interests of people first. Rebecca White, on Saturday, will lead a majority Labor government for Tasmanians, not just for special interests. It's vitally important that Tasmanians hear the call and that they vote for a better future for Tasmanians, not something simply perpetuating the special interests which have been supporting the Hodgman Liberal government.

Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to have recently become the chair of the government's backbench committee on small business, employment, innovation and science, and I look forward to working closely with the Minister for Small and Family Business, the Workplace and Deregulation, the Hon. Craig Laundy, for the benefit of Australia's small and family businesses and, ultimately, for the benefit of all of Brisbane and all Australians. I believe it's important to focus on how the fortunes of Australia's small and family businesses are so closely tied to the prosperity of almost all Australians out there. This is important because, at this time, the Turnbull government has a suite of policies which are turbocharging small and family businesses, leading to record numbers of jobs and opportunities being created around Australia. Four hundred and three thousand new jobs were created last year—the highest number for any year on record. That is 1,100 jobs a day. Seventy-five per cent of those—three out of every four—are full-time jobs.

Yet we see this opposition crab-walking away from sensible economic policies—crab-walking away from what used to be standard, bipartisan planks of this country's economic agenda: tax cuts; trade; jobs creation; independent IR decision-making. The opposition these days is crab-walking away from that Hawke-Keating economic legacy, despite the fact that those old Labor leaders built that legacy by trying to drag Labor back towards mainstream economic policies to make them re-electable and ultimately worthy to hold government again.

This emerging and growing difference between the major parties that we're seeing on economic matters, and other matters, is, I think, one of the most important underlying trends in politics at the moment. It's possibly a shame that more journalists and more commentators are not so attuned to it. We've had 26 years now of sustained economic growth in this country.

That's not just a throwaway line or a statistic; it's a significant achievement that no other country around the world has managed to match. In practice it means that Australians under the age of 40 such as I have never been in the workforce during an actual recession. It means that Australians have become over that time some of the most prosperous and egalitarian citizens around the world. It means that our living standards over that period of time grew more than most other developed countries and that we can, consequently, afford to do more and be more than the generations that came before us. So that's really what's at stake here.

As this government takes those sensible economic foundations which used to enjoy bipartisan support and takes that strong economic base forward into the 21st century with our focuses on international competitiveness, trade, tax reform and the National Innovation and Science Agenda, on the other hand we see a Labor Party dismantling the very policy base that it used to support and that saw Australia achieve those 26 long years of unmatched economic growth.

When it comes to the jobs and the growth being delivered today, small business really is the key, Deputy Speaker. Small businesses already do more than any other sector to provide jobs, opportunities and prosperity, including for the young, for women, for the lower trained and for the most vulnerable in our society. Eighty per cent—eight out of 10—of all of the jobs that have been created in this country over the last 10 years were created in small and new businesses. That's according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So small business is not just the backbone of our economy; it's the powerhouse of our growth when it comes to creating new jobs and opportunities.

So it's by no means an accident that our economic plan has been structured around supporting small businesses at its very core as its starting point, as our tiered economic tax plan shows. Cutting taxes to our small and medium businesses first, everything we are doing is centred on them and with them first in mind, because we know that the policies that we're implementing are good for investment. It's freeing up businesses to invest in their businesses and, ultimately, in creating the opportunities that mean new jobs. We know that every single time in the past a federal Australian government has reduced that headline corporate tax rate there have been higher corporate tax takes for the government in the future. That shows two things. Firstly, it used to be bipartisan policy and well known that cutting tax stokes growth. Secondly, it increases the confidence to invest.

We're also trying to rekindle this nation's great reputation for innovation and backing it to ensure our world-class research and technology can be commercialised to create even more opportunities. The National Innovation and Science Agenda of this government I think will be forever remembered as the birthplace for so many Australian success stories in business, so many inventions, so many medical research breakthroughs and other breakthroughs, so many new business start-ups and so many successful entrepreneurs.

Yet we're also giving businesses the confidence to invest and grow by themselves. In many ways, our agenda of creating this business-friendly environment has steadied the ship for our business community after far too many years of policy uncertainty under previous governments. Government can never be the sole creator of new jobs and opportunities, and in many ways it's just as important sometimes for policymakers to know when to get out of the way of business when it's creating those opportunities and that prosperity.

It's really important for policymakers to properly comprehend the potential, needs and challenges of, especially, our small business sector and our family businesses, because, when policymakers think first and foremost about big businesses, big unions and big government doing deals and making decisions, they really ultimately fail small businesses and the majority of Australians who are employed in those small businesses. Firstly, if policymakers make new regulations or new laws for particular industries and they think first and foremost only of the big businesses in that industry, they can often fail to comprehend how the compliance burden will fall more onerously on the small businesses. They can actually create the situation where big businesses get a competitive advantage over those small businesses and start-ups by being more easily able to comply with the new laws or regulations. Even when many small businesses aren't directly regulated or licensed, they certainly can still feel the cumulative burden of business red tape. Well-intentioned but ill-considered and sometimes poorly administered regulations can kill otherwise good businesses by making hardworking small business people throw in the towel.

My experience, as I've outlined in this place previously, is that too many small businesses are currently surviving in that fraught purgatory of noncompliance and non-enforcement. Better government is the key, and our party was founded on these principles focused on the forgotten people: shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women. To support our small businesses today, I believe the small business middle class will be just as likely to include young entrepreneurs, creative industry types, tradies, independent contractors and medical researchers—professionals who have specialised in areas of expertise but don't want to be shackled by employment to individual advisory or big service firms. To support the emerging small business class of today and tomorrow, wherever possible we need to keep up this focus on ensuring that our regulations are based more around principles than overprescriptions. It is a change I think we can encourage, especially with Minister Laundy at the head of our small business agenda. Like me, the minister is of and from the small and family business sector. He understands where prosperity comes from.

Sadly, the Labor Party is becoming so divorced from their past and from business that these days they confuse income with profit. Last year 1.1 million small and family businesses made not one single dollar in profit yet at the same time employed hundreds and thousands of people and paid salaries amounting to almost $40 billion. What will happen to those businesses and all their employees under a change of government? What will happen to the hardworking small business owners when they get a Labor Party that wants to roll back all those policies we've been implementing to support their businesses to grow? Most importantly, what will happen to the millions of Australians who work for those small businesses if they get a Labor government that doesn't even pretend to understand how the small business sector works, given how their deals and policymaking focus on big business, big unions and big government? The Turnbull government is right now delivering the support that small and family businesses need.