Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister: Will the Prime Minister please outline to the House how the government is strengthening the economy and backing business to create even more jobs for Australian workers, including in my electorate of Petrie? 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. Only last week, we were at Kennedy's Timbers, a business in his electorate, where we saw the results of confidence and of determination to invest and build a business. Indeed, this was in a week when we learned that, since the coalition government was elected under the leadership of the member for Warringah in 2013, Australians had together created 1,013,600 jobs. That was months before the five-year target, ahead of time. And those jobs have been built by the optimism and the commitment and the passion of Australian businesses like Kennedy's Timbers. As Michael Kennedy observed during our visit, he took on one new employee in April, and she may very well have been the one millionth new employee taken on in Australia.

This is the consequence of Australians rising to the challenge of investing, of having a go, of taking a risk, and of building their businesses. We have enabled that and supported that with one policy after another that creates more opportunities for Australians to invest, whether it is lower business taxes, whether it is an instant asset write-off, whether it is ensuring that there are more export opportunities by creating one big free trade deal after another with China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, more recently Peru, and, of course, the 11-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which we recall the Labor Party urged us to abandon and said we were deluded in pursuing.

So, by cutting taxes for small and medium family businesses, we have seen this great growth in employment, and we must not forget that a business that earns revenue of $50 million a year or less is not a giant business—it's overwhelmingly going to be an Australian family-owned business—but more than half of all Australians work for those Australian small and medium family-owned businesses. And they are the ones, like Kennedy's Timbers, that are responding to the incentives we've created. This enables us to guarantee and deliver increasing funding for the essential services Australians rely on: schools, hospitals, security, keeping Australians safe, the vital economic infrastructure we need. All of this is enabled by a stronger economy.

And, yes, there is an alternative. It's the alternative of Labor, with over $200 billion of new taxes, which would crush that energy and that growth. (Time expired)