Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll agree with Senator Dodson on at least one thing: unity is important. On this side of the chamber, we have seen a government that is getting on with the job of delivering for Australians. Senator Watt is having a chuckle over there—and he must have had a chuckle when he read the paper this morning with the inside information on the caucus meeting, showing division over trade revealed for all to see, including very fine detail as to what was actually said in that meeting. I'm sure Senator Watt would have had a chuckle then.

What that reveals is an opposition with significant problems, and it comes at a time when we see right around the world a belief in the benefits of trade being challenged by a return to a populist view of economics. Clearly, that is strongly at play in the Labor Party of today where you've got a risk to the benefits of free trade when Australian businesses, Australian workers and Australians on the whole know that Australia is at the end of the line. We are a trading nation. If we do not trade, we have nothing. We need to trade with the rest of the world. In Western Australia, some 95 per cent of the wheat grown needs to be exported. There is no domestic market for it. With our livestock and so many areas of our agricultural production and mineral wealth that we export to the world, we are a trading nation and an exporting nation. We need to develop those trade links with the rest of the world in order to generate the wealth, in order to drive those businesses and in order to drive the jobs and the wages growth that all Australians want and which this government has been delivering.

My two colleagues who spoke before me, Senator Hume and Senator Paterson, talked about the jobs being created, so I won't go into that in detail. But 1,144,500 jobs—more than achieving the commitment of this government to deliver a million jobs in two terms. What do jobs do? Jobs give incomes to families. Jobs give people hope. Jobs give people dignity. The vast majority of those jobs are in the private sector. The majority of those jobs were full-time jobs. This is an unashamedly good-news story built on the back of a stronger economy and significantly positive economic reforms that this government has undertaken over the last five years.

The last quarterly results that came out show an Australian economy growing at 3.4 per cent, surpassing market expectation significantly. In fact, Australia is now in its 27th year of consecutive economic growth—the highest growth rate since 2012, a year, I will note, that was the height of the mining boom. Our economy is growing at a stronger rate than the world's seven largest advanced economies, the G7: the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Japan. And we are growing faster than the OECD average. If you listened to those opposite, you'd think that perhaps something very different was the case, but in actual fact our economy is performing extraordinarily well.

And it's not an imbalanced growth; that growth is being shared across the economy and across all states. The strongest growth was, in fact, in South Australia. Victoria is next and then Tasmania—not necessarily the states you would think of as being those driving the economic strength of Australia. But, of course, all states grew in that particular quarter, contributing to that nominal GDP growth rate for the year of 4.7 per cent as of September 2018. That beat the budget forecast of 4.25 per cent.

This means that in the economy no one sector needs to do the heavy lifting. We're not relying on the mining sector to drive economic growth, jobs and opportunities for Australians. It's a broad based economic growth that is good for all Australians. Again, it's good for Australians because it delivers those jobs. It delivers those high-quality jobs—those full-time jobs, those jobs that put food on the table for families and which give opportunities for gain further knowledge, to go and complete more education, and to gain the dignity that exists from having a job in a positive economy.

Household spending is above the long-term average, demonstrating confidence in the economy—confidence by the Australian people. That, in turn, is supporting this strong job creation achieved by the coalition government. And with job creation and a low unemployment rate, that will flow through into wages growth.

For my home state of Western Australia, the consistency in this government has delivered a significant reform to a very intractable problem, which was the GST issue. Since July 2018, along with the release of the Productivity Commission report, we have proposed reforms vital to fixing the issue of GST-sharing arrangements. This government wants to make the GST-sharing arrangements fairer, particularly in light of the situation in WA, whilst also making sure that no state is worse off. Currently—we all know this—Western Australia receives 47c in every dollar. That would jump to 70c and then to 75c under this government's plan. That results in a significant extra amount to spend on things such as schools, hospitals and other services over the next eight years: $4.7 billion. So we see a government that is actually delivering on the ground, delivering for my home state of Western Australia.

What is the flow-on effect of all of this economic growth which I have mentioned, and fixing economic problems like the GST-sharing arrangements and delivering a million-plus jobs into the economy—a vast majority of which, I will say again, are in the private sector and a majority of which are full-time jobs? It's less welfare dependency; it's fewer people who are actually relying on the welfare system. We have seen the percentage of working-age Australians on welfare falling to 15.1 per cent, the lowest rate of welfare dependency in over 25 years. On this side of the chamber, that is unmistakably a positive thing. But I do wonder if that's how those opposite feel.

New welfare reform measures have made the welfare system fairer, more equitable and easier to understand. We have strengthened mutual obligation requirements and are providing more incentives to help people move from welfare to work, and that's what they've done. We have seen jobs created and the welfare rolls fall. This is unashamedly good for the economy as a whole, taking the burden off taxpayers, allowing money to be redirected to important government spending and to tax cuts. It also means that people who are no longer on the welfare roll have a chance of breaking the cycle of welfare dependency that every study shows and everybody knows is so destructive to individual and family wellbeing.

We do believe that the best form of welfare is a job. We've delivered those million-plus jobs over the past five and a bit years, in less than two terms of government, and we will continue to deliver, because that is what this side of the chamber does for the Australian people. We deliver what we say we're going to deliver. We deliver good government and we deliver good economic management, and that allows us to provide such things as income tax relief to hardworking Australians. We're making income taxes lower, fairer and simpler. In 2018-19, around 4.4 million Australians will get tax relief of $530 per year and over 10 million taxpayers will get some tax relief. By the time our tax plan is fully implemented, we will see 94 per cent of taxpayers pay no more than 32.5 cents in the dollar. This is a great economic reform for Australia. It will allow Australian families to keep more of their own hard-earned money and invest that money in their families, their own future, their own education and their own wellbeing. It will give people opportunities into the future—opportunities to perhaps start a small business and create the new jobs of the future, which deliver such benefits to all Australians.