Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Cook making a statement immediately and that the Member speak without limitation of time.

Question agreed to.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I call the honourable member for Cook, I remind the House that this is the honourable member's first speech, and I ask the House to extend to him the usual courtesies.

Simon Kennedy (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What an honour it is to stand here today as the sixth member for Cook. This is a place of responsibility where we shape the future, but there's much to be learnt from Australia's past. Australia is a country that harboured an Indigenous culture for 60,000 years, disrupted by a penal colony, taking on successive waves of impoverished immigrants escaping war or desperately wanting for a better life.

Yet in 2021 Australia was proclaimed as the richest country on the planet. What are the chances that a penal colony disrupting an Indigenous population, taking on waves of impoverished immigrants, could become the richest country on earth? If a government department had hired my old shop McKinsey to answer this question, they would have told them the bleedingly obvious: the business case does not stack up!

What, then, created this improbable miracle of a society? It was Middle Australia. What is Middle Australia? It's the belief we are all equal in this country. It's the belief we all get a fair go. It's the dispossessed Indigenous Australians fighting to close the gap. It's the marginalised European convicts who built our first cities. It's the migrants who came here fighting for a better life. In each generation they have a name: Menzies's forgotten people, the small-businessmen and -women, the nurses, teachers, and the first responders too; Howard's battlers in our outer suburbs, who had the belief that, if you worked hard, you would get ahead; Morrison's quiet Australians, who rejected the class warfare of regressive taxation. These are the people too busy running businesses to tune into question time, too busy with their family to rage on social media, and for the first time in generations they are at risk of being let down by this country.

I am proudly a product of Middle Australia. My story is about the opportunities that come from hard work, an unconventional-but-loving family and living in a lucky country. My mum and dad separated when I was a toddler. Dad was American. Mum is Australian. And, courtesy of the High Court, I am now 100 per cent dinki-di Australian! After Mum and Dad split, Dad moved home to the United States and I moved into a very full house with my mum, grandparents, aunt and uncle in Sydney's west.

My mum, Louise, was my anchor and my nurturer. She made me who I am. She gave me the belief I could do anything but also the freedom to just be me. My dad, Tony, gave me a relentless work ethic, determination and, I think, male pattern baldness as well! Dad was one of 10 children, an American Irish Catholic, ferociously loyal and with a deep sense of family. Mum worked at the local high school while my grandfather Stewart, who I called Stew, was my primary carer. I never went to day care or preschool; instead I went everywhere with my grandfather Stew, chopping wood on winter afternoons in the backyard, painting the house or driving the 1935 Dodge—the family's only car—to do the shopping.

Stew would tell me stories on Australia's history. He was born in 1912 in Demondrille Junction, a town in country NSW that no longer exists, an exceptional, honest, hardworking, quiet Australian. He shaped the values that I will seek to honour in this job. He told me about his family and childhood in Demondrille and how they relied on one another and didn't wait for government. That's how I learnt family must come first. He told me about the impacts of World War One, supporting his family in the Depression, and why he and my grandmother enlisted in World War II. That's how I learnt individual freedoms must be protected. One of his favourite things to quote was Menzies's 'Forgotten people' speech. That's how I learnt a strong Australia is built on the back of a strong middle class. Stew passed away 10 years ago at 101, but he's still with me in the values I seek to live out every day.

Growing up, my school years were typical. I proudly went to local public schools and played rugby league, soccer and cricket. This love of sport was fostered by my stepdad, Bruce, a teacher like mum who later taught me year 12 economics. Bruce guided me through some of my life's toughest and biggest decisions.

I started my working career delivering junk mail, moving furniture and even working as a bouncer in Kings Cross—a job, Mr Speaker, I'm learning has some similarities with yours!

After university, I found myself working at McKinsey, a job which took me all over the world. That job changed my life, because quite late one night, in a bar in Washington DC, I met my wife, Nila. We eventually married and moved to Australia to raise our young family. Nila is my biggest supporter, and our family is the most important thing in my life. Nila, my son, Taj, and our daughter, Kaia, are in the gallery tonight.

Professionally, while I worked with businesses, governments and communities around the world, I was always driven by the values Stuart taught me at home. I always had family, individual freedoms and social mobility at the forefront of my thinking when advising on Haiti's recovery from a devastating earthquake, the United States' recovery from the financial crisis, or Australia's recovery from the COVID pandemic. In doing this work, I gained a foundation for problem-solving that I still carry today. I learned the importance of listening, because it's impossible to solve a problem you don't fully understand. I learned the limitations of government, and that it is individuals, communities and businesses that chart a country's ultimate success. I learned to be evidence-based, to be guided by facts, rather than opinions, and to change my views as the evidence changes. Most importantly, I learned there is always more to learn.

I see my role as an MP similar to my role for decades—to listen and to try to solve problems for the country and, most importantly, the people of Cook. Cook is a stunningly beautiful part of Sydney, surrounded by water, with Botany Bay and Georges River in the north, the Hacking River in the south, and the beaches of Bate Bay in the east. The suburbs in between are bursting with small businesses and tradies, full of surfers, sports nuts, clubbies and churchgoers. There are Sharks supporters, Dragon supporters and the occasional Bulldogs supporter too. More than a third are first-generation immigrants and, just like me, over half had one parent born abroad.

Coincidentally, my first function as the member for Cook was to commemorate Captain Cook's landing in Kamay, Kurnell. Kurnell is in the sleepy heart of my electorate, the landing place of Captain Cook, the epicentre of the clash of two cultures, and I think it beautifully exposes the juxtaposition of Middle Australia. It provides the backdrop to European settlement, it houses sacred Dharawal Indigenous sites and is home to World Heritage listed wetlands. Its petroleum refineries used to power our nation, its waste depot takes what Sydney does not want and its sand mines have provided the concrete to construct half of Sydney's housing. It has one functioning church, no doctor in town and almost no complaints—that is, until a contentious housing proposal for 4,000 new homes, which beautifully illustrates Australia's housing crisis. Unlike much of Australia, Cook has quietly and regularly exceeded its housing targets. The prize for this achievement is, of course, congested roads, limited parking, overcrowded sporting fields and schools bursting with demountables. Infrastructure funding? I don't think so. The good citizens of Cook are still waiting for funding to complete the F6 freeway. This might be the most overdue project in Australia's history, being first announced 72 years ago in 1952. But the people of Cook know how to wait. The famous Cronulla Sharks coach Jack Gibson once said, 'Waiting for Cronulla to win a premiership is like leaving a porch light on for Harold Holt.' Then, after 50 years, Harold suddenly came home. I'm going to be asking the member for Ballarat over there to keep her porch light on, because I want to pop past and get some F6 funding pretty soon.

The people of Cook don't complain; instead, they get on with things. It is an egalitarian electorate full of hardworking small-business owners—resourceful and optimistic people. It's a microcosm of middle Australia. But, rightly, they feel they are being ignored. Right now, our country is governed for the squeaky wheel, the vested interests, and the large corporates with their lobbyists and their megaphones. It's not for the silent majority and definitely not for the small business. There are three areas where I believe Middle Australia is at risk of being let down by government: firstly, small business; secondly, housing; and, thirdly, how we grow the economy.

Firstly is small business. Today in Australia, the small business and the individual have never felt smaller, because large governments and corporations have never been larger. Large governments and large corporates share similar characteristics. They both believe their size gives them the power and moral authority to tell individuals and families how or what to think. As a Liberal, I believe the moral authority rests with the individual, with the family and with the growing small business.

The beating heart of Cook and Australia is the small and medium business. Two-thirds of Australians are employed by them. Innovation, disproportionately, comes from young, small firms. These are the engine room of our economy, because small business hires while large business fires. Research has shown all net new job growth in the economy came from small and medium businesses that grew. If we truly want a vibrant and growing economy we need to support small and medium businesses better—support them to scale, support them to become more productive. Instead, we have allowed a system to develop that strangles the growing small business with anti-competitive regulation. We have given our big banks, supermarkets, airlines and unions an outsize voice in shaping this country and its regulations. We need to dramatically deregulate our industries to allow the growing small business to compete and flourish.

Secondly, we are at risk of letting middle Australia down on housing. A core belief in this country has been that if you work hard you can buy a home and get ahead. Yet homeownership has never been more out of reach than it is for this current generation. In Cook, the median house price is over $3 million in Cronulla, Port Hacking and Burraneer, and over $2 million in Kogarah Bay, Blakehurst and Sans Souci. The good news? It's just $1.7 million in sleepy Kurnell. But is a house Kurnell in reach for middle Australia? If your family earned the average household income and scraped together a 10 per cent deposit and, luckily, got to lock in a low six per cent interest rate, the average household could never—I repeat: never—ever repay the mortgage on a median house in Kurnell. Even if you had no expenses—no food, no clothes, no energy, no water, no rates and no kids—and even if you lived and worked for an eternity. Once, more than half of all adults 29 and under owned homes in Australia. That number now is at risk of plummeting to less than one-third. It's hard to tell what this will do to the social fabric of Australia if allowed to continue. The promise of this next generation being better off than their parents is now disappearing rapidly.

Governments and politicians have been talking about this issue more than ever; talking about how bad it is and talking about how it must be improved, but this is entirely a failure of government. Today in Sydney up to 50 per cent of the cost of a new house is government. That's tax, that's red tape and that's the planning process. How ridiculous is this? The rhetoric of governments around Australia has been to scream out about a housing affordability crisis, one that's largely of their own making. What used to make our country great is that government got out of the way and allowed middle Australia to build and grow. To help achieve this again, I believe the federal government should make states and councils compete for funding and allocate this funding based on their ability to quickly and cost effectively release land and approve housing. Federal infrastructure funding should be explicitly tied to housing completions. Areas like Cook, which have exceeded their housing targets, could be rewarded with funding for critical projects, like that F6 freeway, instead of being punished with overcrowding.

We should also be incentivising states to provide people with pathways to prosperity. The federal government could offer to cover rent assistance in exchange for states redeveloping their public housing and providing pathways for public housing tenants to purchase their homes—public housing tenants to buy their own homes. If we can solve this housing crisis, we can empower younger Australians again. We can give them hope—hope and reward for their hard work, hope in the opportunity for social mobility and hope to invest in themselves and their families.

Migration has been a huge part of Australia's success. We are the most successful multicultural nation on earth. However, right now our population is growing faster than at any time since 1952. Housing just can't keep up; for every new home being built in Australia we have more than three new entrants into the country. There are Australians who can't even find homes to rent, yet we continue to allow the demand for housing to grow. In the short term we need to match migration levels with the ability of the building industry to supply new homes. The one area where we do need to dramatically increase migration is migrants with skills in construction related industries. This would allow housing supply to catch up with population growth.

The third way we are at risk of letting down Middle Australia is how we grow the economy. Currently, the government will tell you the economy is growing, but record migration is being used to paper over the weakness of the Australian economy. Large corporates enjoy this unsustainable migration because it means more profits and more customers, even if they do nothing. But the truth of this growing economy is a little bit murkier. We've actually been in a per capita recession for one year. Productivity has ground to a halt.

But what do these technical terms mean for you and your family? It means your real income has gone down 7½ per cent in the last two years alone. It means you can't buy as much as you could before. It means you and your family can't afford a house. It means the 528,000 new entrants into the country only had 170,000 new homes to choose from. The maths just doesn't work. The government and corporate Australia tell us the economy is growing, but you and your family are just getting poorer. What's more, this lazy approach to economic growth is punishing state governments, who are left with the bill. The states are left to provide housing, schools, hospitals and roads for a booming population they have had little say in accommodating.

So, if growing the economy through population is lazy economics and the participation rate is already at an all-time high, how do we improve the living standards for Middle Australia? The answer is productivity. Productivity has been responsible for 80 per cent of the increase in average Australian living standards in the past 30 years. But still there's room to improve. The average American worker produces 25 per cent more than the average Australian. But this is not the fault of the Australian worker; this is the fault of successive governments, who've kicked the ball into the long grass when it comes to unleashing productivity. We've seen little economic reform since Howard's GST and Hawke and Keating's economic liberalisation.

A key part of creating productivity is making our federation work better. Federation must be a partnership for productivity, not a memorandum of mediocrity. When I lived in America I was impressed by the sheer competition across 50 states and the policy innovation this drove. Each state competed for corporate investment, federal government funding and for citizens to call it home. Australia needs to re-embrace competitive federalism so taxpayers get the best value for each dollar spent. This was the type of thinking behind Abbott and Hockey's asset recycling reforms and Keating's competition payments.

Asset recycling transformed the face of Sydney. It spurred new metros, new roads, new communities and new homes, and it enabled many new Australians to build new lives. Currently, in Australia, states are disincentivised from improving productivity. Take stamp duty, a tax on people moving, or payroll tax, a tax on job creation. States believe, if they remove or replace one of these, the GST formula could punish them with less federal GST revenue. How can we better incentivise states to implement productive reform? Ensuring the Grants Commission will fund, not punish, states for productive reform must be part of the answer. How can we better incentivise states to build more homes? Again, I believe we should force the states and regions to compete for federal infrastructure funding based on their housing completions.

Victoria's rising debt level should serve as a warning to us all. States should not be bailed out of trouble. Instead, they should be rewarded for productive success. Competition is about performance, and we need better performance at all levels of government, because improved performance will support Middle Australia with more homes, more jobs, more opportunity and more hope.

It's an honour to be in this place today, with the opportunity to be part of solving these problems, and a privilege to represent the people of Cook. There are a few people I want to thank, because without them I would not be here. Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a loyal servant to Australia and Cook: thank you for your advice and continued support. To those Liberal Party members who have supported my journey: thank you.

Mum, you've spent your life caring for other people and you're a great inspiration to me in this job. Dad, thank you for your constant love and support. And thanks to the Kennedy clan for the warm Christmas memories. Bruce, you have played a pivotal role in my life and I am thankful to your family for embracing me. My sister, Rebecca, is a constant source of loyalty and laughs. My in-laws in the gallery, Selma and Malcolm, have travelled here all the way from America. Hari and Jung Lee's health has kept them at home. Thank you for welcoming me into your family.

My wife, Nila, and two kids, Taj and Kaia—if you are still awake—I love you. You guys are the most important things in my life and I know I will feel the cost of this job when I am away from you. I hope I can make you guys proud.

Lastly, I wouldn't be out here without the people of Cook. Thank you for the honour of choosing me to represent you. My family and I feel incredibly lucky to now call this electorate home.

Australia's progress over the last 200 years has been nothing short of remarkable, but now we risk ripping opportunity and hope from the hearts of Middle Australians. We are kicking the ladder out from under their feet. This country must remain a meritocracy where hard work is rewarded, where everyone is given the opportunity to get ahead and where Middle Australians are empowered. They deserve at least that much. This is the Australia I will be fighting for.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the honourable member for Cook. We wish him all the very best in his new parliamentary role.