Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In other words, Senator O’Brien, what your party was spending on education, on health, on policing, on Australia’s role in the world and international activities—on all of those areas—you were spending on the Bankcard. We had the task, on coming to government in 1996, of not only looking at how we were going to deliver our own promises to the Australian community but first of all paying off the ones that you had made and delivered on the Bankcard. That is the reality of the matter, so do not lecture us—with respect, Senator—on the way in which we cut the budget in 1996. We cut the budget in 1996 in order to bring Australian fiscal arrangements under control and to produce the surplus budgets and the reduced and eliminated debt that was necessary to make the Australian economy strong. And we have achieved that.

I can understand the disappointment that the Australian Labor Party felt on budget night this week when they heard what was in this budget which did so much to provide for the future security of the Australian community. You could imagine the intake of breath; you could almost hear the thuds on the floor around the building as the jaws hit the floor. You could also see very clearly on the faces of various Labor Party people around this building the thought: ‘Quick, we’ve got to find a line about this budget. We’ve got to find something to say about it that will be credible, that will be plausible. We’ve got 48 hours before Kevin gets up in the other place. Find something for him to say.’ Some bright spark fished out some figures about productivity. ‘Yes,’ they decided, ‘We will make this all about how productivity has gone by the board under the coalition government.’

The interesting thing to note when talking about productivity is that it is a concept which the Labor Party has not spoken very much about at all for a very long time. Productivity is one of those terms that, if you go and check back in the Hansard and you use the search engine to find out when it has been spoken about, you will not find it mentioned very often at all. It is one of those things that the Labor Party almost avoids, because productivity is one of the issues that are often cited by business as a reason to restructure working environments. It has a certain distastefulness on the lips of the Australian Labor Party—a bit like profitability. If we think of productivity as being about increasing the outputs of Australian industry and business in relation to the number of inputs that go in, it is an issue which goes fundamentally to the way in which Australian industries, businesses and workplaces operate. On that score, I think the Australian Labor Party has a great deal of ambivalence about the way in which it approaches productivity.

The basic fact that the Labor Party cannot escape is that our record on productivity has been very good, and it is even better when it is compared with that of the Labor governments which preceded this one. In 2005-06, GDP per hour worked in the market sector in Australia grew by 2.3 per cent. That is a very solid record on productivity. In the December quarter just past, productivity grew by 1.4 per cent, seasonally adjusted. That quarter was, of course, affected by the changes brought about by Work Choices. We were told that, after the introduction of Work Choices, people were going to lose conditions, people were going to lose jobs, and people were going to be falling over left, right and centre. In fact—along with the shibboleths that went out the window—we saw productivity grow in the Australian economy. Obviously, rates of productivity are a volatile issue. They do fluctuate up and down. We saw, late last year, the confluence of strong employment growth and a slower rate of real GDP growth, leading to negative productivity in the September quarter of the last calendar year. In the December quarter it picked up again, and that is a matter of record. Looking at a longer cycle, to get a better picture of what goes on, we can see that in the five years to 2003-04 labour productivity grew by 2.1 per cent per year on average. That is a rate of productivity well above the rate that prevailed during the 1980s.

On the question of productivity, the Labor Party are on very thin ice indeed. It is clear that they enter the debate with some temerity; in fact, they can only enter this debate by effectively refusing to talk about what they would do about this question. When it comes to advancing issues to produce productivity in the Australian community, Labor just do not have anything to say.

Let us look back over the last 10 years and ask ourselves, ‘What was the biggest industry-specific productivity issue that arose?’ We could talk about industrial relations, workplace reform, balance of trade and all those sorts of things, but what was the one industry-specific productivity issue that hit the Australian community in the face? It was, of course, waterfront reform. Everybody acknowledges that we had appalling productivity on the Australian waterfront. We have heard Senator Carr talk about the number of PhDs in Switzerland and fallacious comparisons like that. Efficiency and productivity on the Australian waterfront, up to the mid-1990s, was appalling. This government had to deal with that issue because the previous government simply did not want to address it.