Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to participate in the address-in-reply. I begin by taking this opportunity to thank the electors of New South Wales for returning me to the Senate for what now appears to be a six-year term, having been appointed in 2011 and elected in 2013. I welcome being in the Senate and I welcome the many colleagues we have in the Senate from all parties. I said in my maiden speech that I do not doubt the motives of anyone who comes here or that they want to contribute to making what is the greatest country in the world even better. We come at it from different angles and perhaps with different sets of values and beliefs, but we also come to it with some common principles—one of which is an overriding faith and belief in the strength of Australian democracy, which is, at its pinnacle, exemplified by the House of Representatives—that other place—and by this great deliberative chamber. So it is a privilege to have been re-elected to this place and to have the opportunity to participate in the address-in-reply.

It is also a privilege to be in government. I often say to people that the worst day in government is infinitely to be preferred to the best day in opposition, because in government you can do things—you can get things done. We have an opportunity in this parliament to get things done, and we will have plenty of things to get our teeth into. I noted that, when the Governor-General made his address in this very chamber in front of all the members and senators, it was quite a long address, because he actually had quite a long agenda that he was reciting on behalf of the government. I welcome the fact that there is a substantial agenda but I also take at face value what other people in this chamber and in the other place, including the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Shorten, have said about wanting to make the parliament work. Ultimately we will all be judged by whether we have made this parliament work. That means getting down to work and considering the business that comes before us in terms of legislation, motions and so forth.

It was a long and tough campaign. It was an eight-week campaign, and the counting seemed to take quite a long time as well. But the fact is that we are now here and the agenda that we have put up—which I will now start to go through—is an agenda which I think, properly explained, will get the support of the Australian people as we go through the individual measures. We already gained their support by being reaffirmed as the government at the last election. Yes, it was a close election, but we come to government with a mandate to get things done. It is important that we not only explain to people carefully why we believe certain measures should go through but also have the capacity to deal honestly and openly with all members of this place and the other place in a genuine spirit of give and take. There will be some measures which will be hard for us to give up, because we will say, 'They go to core measures that we put to the Australian people.' But we want to see outcomes and we believe the Australian people want to see outcomes, and we will approach those deliberations on legislation with people in this chamber and elsewhere in that same spirit.

This is the first time since 2004 that a federal government has been returned with a majority in its own right. That in itself is a good and positive step for the parliament as a whole. I believe that we have to build on that and, as a government, even if we have a majority of one in the lower house, we have to act as if we have a majority of 21 or 41 and stand up for what we believe and for the agenda that we have put to the Australian people and try to get that agenda through. We recognise that we face a challenge in the Senate but we welcome the people who have been elected in the Senate, because they have all been elected by the Australian people under a properly constituted election and with voting reforms which have made it very clear that preference-whispering and the like will no longer be the order of the day. So I take at face value every person who comes into this chamber, and we want to work with them on the great matters that come before us.

We have a strong cabinet government and a strong strategic agenda, continuing the work of the coalition in investing in skills and jobs to get more Australians into work and boosting the productivity of our country. If we want to have more jobs, we need more investment and, if we want to have higher wages, we need higher productivity. There is no point mandating yourself a 10 per cent wage increase if a firm cannot actually pay for it. We as a government want to facilitate higher productivity. That is about working smarter. It is not about working longer. Australians work quite long hours. It is about encouraging as many people as possible to be as productive as possible. This is the way of the future for Australia. We know that we cannot rely on the commodity cycle to bail us out every time. We know we live in a region where the competition is intensifying—you have to run harder just to stay in the same spot. So for us the challenge is to manage this transition as our mining sector comes off and create new jobs in new sectors and new industries. For us the challenge in this parliament is to build on the industry framework which we took into the election and on which we delivered the first tranche before the election under the leadership of our Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull.

I want to talk a bit about the 45th Parliament having a rational and cohesive budget framework in which we can appropriately balance our priorities and take into account the impact of our decisions on debt now and in the future. The reality is: Australia's debt position is not one that should be allowed to slide too much. We are an economy which is subject to the vicissitudes of international trade and finance. We do not want to be adversely subject to external shocks. It is very important that we have the capacity that we did during the global financial crisis. The Howard-Costello government had put money away in the bank, we had the Future Fund, we had no net debt. So when the global financial crisis hit we were able to spend more without getting into excessive debt. But since then the debt has continued to rise. This government has taken measures to arrest that, but we cannot have a situation where we constantly say, 'Lord, make me pure, but not now.' We have to have the capacity to start arresting that growth in debt so that future generations do not believe that we frittered away the opportunities that we had.

This is not a counsel to austerity all round. We have to be smart about how we go about budget repair. We have to be very smart about it. It is no longer the case of simply hacking here or there. One of the lessons that came out of the election for the coalition was the importance of being able to talk about health and education not simply through the lens of budget repair but more broadly in terms of the philosophy that we bring to those areas. So one of the challenges in this parliament for the coalition in areas like health and education is to continue the progress in making that Commonwealth government spending as effective and as well focused and targeted as possible, and to make sure that we are not wasting any extra dollar that we put into any of these areas. We want to get away from this idea that you can just put money in and that that is all you need to do. It has to be money directed for a purpose. But I think we can do this. I think we have the smarts as a country to do this, particularly now that we face an ageing population. For us, the whole purpose of government is not simply to sit there and do nothing. The purpose of government is to actually deliver services that people want. But we have to do it in a way that balances the legitimate need for those services with the need to make sure that the tax burden on low- and middle-income earners, in particular, does not fall disproportionately on them because we have to make up for the debt that we have incurred. We want to avoid future taxes by making sure that debt does not go up too much now.

One of the other things that has been a hallmark of the prime ministership of Mr Turnbull has been the focus in budget measures on promoting fairness. We saw this in relation to the measures on superannuation that we took to the election. Our view is that superannuation should be a tool to make it easier for you to maintain a certain standard of living in retirement and to reduce the reliance on the age pension where possible, but not to have it as a tool for estate planning or for leaving excessive accumulations of wealth in a very lightly, or untaxed, vehicle like superannuation. There is no divine right to these tax concessions. These are tax concessions which are paid for, potentially, by higher taxes on other members of society. What we are saying is: those who have high superannuation balances, in particular, have a contribution to make to budget repair. Everybody has to make their fair share of a contribution. That is what we are about. That is the fairness of those measures, and we will pursue those measures in this parliament.

Fairness for us also means that, when we look at the workplace, we make sure that, as Tony Blair once famously said: 'Fairness starts with the possibility of a job.' For us, creating more jobs means what? For example, it means implementing our agenda around the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill and the registered organisations bill. Both—particularly the ABCC bill—seek to bring more of the rule of law into the building construction sector. Why? We want to have that sector as productive and as cost efficient as possible, because the excessive costs of that sector are then passed on in higher costs to the consumers of building and construction products. The federal government and the state governments are big consumers of building and construction. So those costs ultimately end up as costs to Australian taxpayers and come out of the pockets, often, of low- and middle-income earners. So, for us, dealing with issues like the building and construction sector is an economic imperative. It is not about targeting unions. We believe in freedom of association, but we believe everybody should be treated equally before the law. That includes the building and construction sector. It includes the CFMEU; it includes the MUA. It is one rule for everybody. So it is important for us to continue our work in achieving the ABCC bill and the registered organisations bill.

We are already also putting up further savings—which the Labor Party supported during the election campaign—of about $6 billion into what is called the omnibus savings bill. We believe that these are savings that can be harvested early. They are savings that Labor themselves embraced in the campaign, so they should have no problem in embracing them now. We will pick up those savings and use them to help get our deficit under control. We would like to see an early agreement on this, particularly with Labor, if that is possible. It is on top of other things where Labor have changed position. They have changed their position on the pension assets tests; they have changed their position on the schoolkids bonus.

Every time we put the Labor Party under scrutiny on their costings and finances during the campaign, they made further concessions on other items of savings they were prepared to give up. And that is important. In another place and out in the electorate, the Leader of the Opposition said, 'Labor is going to be constructive. We're going to be positive. We're going to make the parliament work.' Well, the parliament work is give and take on both sides. It is very important that there is give and take from both sides.

Our economic plan for skills and jobs is the key to ensuring our prosperity in the years ahead. Someone said during the campaign, 'We heard so much about jobs and growth, jobs and growth.' We will keep hearing about skills and jobs, and jobs and growth until we are sick of saying it. And maybe where we stand on this subject will then have penetrated to the rest of the population: there is a six-point plan we have put together to promote jobs and growth. For us, that is the overriding priority. Every Australian who has a job is an Australian who is proud of themselves, who has high self-esteem and who feels that they do not have to rely on others. Then we make sure our safety net is available to those in the community who need our help. But, where possible, our imperative—whether it is through our industrial relations policies, our budget policies, regulation or reducing red tape—is to promote as many jobs as possible and make it easier for people to get jobs.

For us, having a fully articulated whole-of-government innovation and science agenda—one of the first things that Mr Turnbull did when he became Prime Minister—is very important to promoting this transition in the economy, which I talked about before. It is very important for us to use our defence spending to drive growth in high-end advanced manufacturing. The Minister for Defence is in the chamber and she has been a great champion of this, both in the finalisation of the white paper on defence and, since then, in promoting the white paper across the country. Something like $195 billion worth of investment in defence is coming up over the next few years. That spending seeks to maximise the Australian input and create those high-end advanced manufacturing jobs we talk about. These submarines are about as an advanced a piece of technology as there will be anywhere in the world, not just—