Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Ruston, you've got it! It is South Australia, because of the manic, ideological approach to renewable energy, an approach that is bankrupting households and small businesses and putting people out of work. And do you know what the Labor recipe for this is? Even more of the same! If Mr Shorten were to become Prime Minister, we would be having a 50 per cent renewable energy target to make the current situation so much worse. What are we doing as a Liberal-National Party government? We are saying affordability and security of supply have to be front and centre of any energy policy. So here again we have the answers, and the Australian Labor Party if given the chance would make the situation worse.

Or, indeed, we can move to issue of coastal shipping in this country. It is completely out of whack. Coming from Tasmania, I know the cost of coastal shipping; how it prejudices our capacity to export and as a result to grow jobs. Despite that, I'm delighted to report that when a state and federal Liberal government work together in lock step, as we have done in Tasmania since 2013, the unemployment rate can come down from 8.1 per cent to 5.9 per cent. Now, that is something that really helps households: giving people jobs. That has been the focus of the Liberal governments, both in Canberra and in Hobart, and that is why Premier Will Hodgman and his government deserve such accolades for the wonderful work they are doing in assisting.

But, having said that, we understand that a lot more needs to be done, and that is why the Hodgman Liberal government deserves and needs a second term to drive home those benefits. Coastal shipping is costing Bell Bay, an aluminium smelter in Tasmania, an increase in their shipping costs of 63 per cent. So we have Senator Polley, a Labor senator from Tasmania, opining in this place that we've got a problem with flat wages. Oh! I wonder why that might be? If you bump up the price of production—be it in coastal shipping; be it in relation to the rorts, rackets and rip-offs in building infrastructure; or be it because of a renewable energy target with energy costs; all these things that Labor inflicts on business—then guess what? There is not the room to provide the wage increases that the Australian Labor Party claim that the workers of Australia deserve.

Now, let's be very clear: I would prefer lower energy prices and the capacity for Australian businesses to pay Australian workers more. I would prefer that the cost of infrastructure would be lower so that workers could be paid more. They're the sorts of things that the Australian Labor Party simply do not understand. But what Labor have now embarked upon is a campaign claiming that they are championing equality. What they are championing is unabashed envy. They want to cut down the tall poppy. They want to say, 'If you succeed, we won't be supporting you.' They want to say to people, 'We want equality of outcome.'

We in the Liberal Party believe in equality, but it's in equality of opportunity. No matter what task you give somebody, somebody will be the best at it and somebody will be the worst at it. Indeed, even the Australian Labor Party—allegedly, believe it or not—elect a leader, who gets paid a lot more than the backbench. And, allegedly, Mr Shorten is their best! Believe it or not! But that is what the Labor Party are saying to the Australian people. And that is why he gets paid nearly double the salary of the backbencher. Oh! Where's the equality of that? Have you ever noticed that, when it comes to the Labor Party and trade union officials, the equality issue does not seem to play out?

But the simple fact is that envy corrodes the being. It poisons the soul of the people who harbour that envy, and that is what the Labor Party are, unfortunately, displaying. And so, when Labor say 'equality', understand that it is cheap, nasty envy—a corrosive attribute. All we have to do is look at countries like North Korea and Venezuela. Everybody's equal in those countries these days: equal in abject poverty. Venezuela, before Hugo Chavez, was a country of wealth unparalleled in South America. But today it is in abject poverty, courtesy of the failed socialist prescription.

So in the moments remaining I will just make a few statements that I hope will penetrate the thinking of the Australian Labor Party. But these are truths that are unassailable. They are these: you cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity; what one receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving; the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else; you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it; and when half the people get the idea they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half get the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation. Look at Venezuela: socialism fails when it runs out of other people's money. (Time expired)