James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. After that, colleagues, thank you for staying for this address in reply. It's not typical to have an audience of this size for a speech like this, but I'm grateful for it. I hope we can take the temperature down just a few degrees and get back to the substantive issue before us, which is to respond to the excellent address the Governor-General gave us in this chamber only a few weeks ago outlining the government's very extensive agenda, which I will come to in a moment.

At the outset, I'd like to take the opportunity to congratulate all new members of this place, particularly the many new senators from the Liberal and National parties elected at this election. It is a very pleasing aspect of this election, I must say. I am sure that you will all make a very valuable contribution to this place in your service to the Australian people over the coming years.

The Governor-General's speech opening parliament is an important event in our political system. As His Excellency said in his speech, the opening of a new parliament marks the opening of a new chapter in our country's history. It is important that at times like this we reflect on where we are as a country and where we want to head. Too often, we forget the remarkable stability of our political system, a system that we have inherited and have improved, a system that combines the history and traditions of Westminster with aspects of America's federal system and adds features that are unique to Australia. Our political system, along with other institutions we have derived from the Western civilisation tradition, such as our common law legal system, individual rights and freedoms and our free market economy, deserves much of the credit for the country we have been able to create and enjoy. But nothing is preordained, and much of the credit must go to the wisdom of the Australian people.

Throughout our history, there have been many times, many forks in the road, when the Australian people were asked to make a decision that would have significantly altered the course our country was on. In its own way, this past election involved such a decision. That is because the 2019 election, more than any other election in recent memory, offered the Australian people a clear choice about how they wanted to be governed. This wasn't just a choice between personalities—between Mr Morrison and Mr Shorten—it was also a choice between two clear and distinct visions about the role government ought to play in the lives of everyday Australians. Much has been made, including in the chamber tonight, of the relatively restrained election policy platform that the Liberal and National parties took to the election. For some it has been a source of criticism. We have been accused of having an insufficiently ambitious legislative agenda. It is true we did not take a platform of radical change to the election, and there is a very good reason for that. While Australia certainly faces challenges, and there are issues this parliament must and will confront in this term, on this side of the chamber we did not believe that Australia was so fundamentally broken that it needed a radical overhaul. Australia is not a perfect country, but we have much to be proud of as a nation. We believe that Australia is a wonderful place to live, work, raise a family, and pursue your own vision of a happy life. We are prosperous, harmonious and free. A radical reform agenda is not needed to secure that. In fact, it's much more likely to put it at jeopardy. What is needed is evolutionary change which reaffirms and strengthens the values and institutions that have already made our country great.

The coalition's vision at the last election was fundamentally about trusting the Australian people. It was about trusting that they knew what was best for their own lives. It was about encouraging their aspirations and making sure that government policy empowered them so they could benefit from their own hard work. It's this vision of trust that is behind the policies we took to the election and it's behind the agenda that the Governor-General laid out in his speech on our behalf.

Take the personal income tax cuts that have passed the parliament in our first sitting week. These are fundamentally about ensuring that Australians are able to keep more of their own money because they know better how to spend it than anyone in this place ever will. They are designed to encourage Australians to work hard and to do the best for themselves and their families, whether that involves going for promotion, starting a new business or simply deciding to spend more time with their kids. These are decisions that people should be able to make without the disincentives that result from an excessive tax burden, unnecessary regulation or an overly technocratic state that attempts to tell them what decisions they ought to be making. This vision explains why the Morrison government is committed to cutting red tape, as the Prime Minister recently outlined in his speech to the Western Australian chamber of commerce.

When we were elected in 2013, the coalition embarked on a red-tape-reduction agenda. In our first three years we reduced the burden of red tape by an estimated $5.8 billion. Removing these outdated and excessive regulations was an important first step, but there is still much that needs to be done. According to the Institute of Public Affairs, red tape costs the Australian economy $176 billion every year. I was very pleased to see my friend, Mr Ben Morton, appointed to take responsibility for that red-tape-reduction agenda from the Prime Minister's department.

Some regulation may be necessary, but Australians don't need a bureaucrat constantly looking over their shoulders and monitoring everything they do as they attempt to go about their business. In order to enable Australians to thrive, we must continue to place trust in them and reduce the excessive regulation and unnecessary red tape that they currently have to deal with. That's why we will continue this project by consulting businesses across Australia and learning from them about the unnecessary or overly complex regulations that they have to deal with. We will then work together to reduce those burdens, if not eliminate them entirely.

Of course, the government has a broader agenda than cutting taxes and reducing red tape, as good as those things are. We are already committed to providing record funding for infrastructure, with $100 billion already allocated over the next decade. And we're providing record spending for health and education funding to ensure the high-quality services that the Australian people expect us to provide are secured. But this is only possible because of the hard work of returning the budget to surplus. In its own way, this is a reflection of the vision we took to the election. That's because, just as we trust the Australian people, the Australian people expect us to engage in prudent economic management so that future generations of Australians are not burdened with the debts of the current generation.

Contrast this to the vision that the Labor Party took to the election. Far from attempting to present themselves as economic conservatives, as Kevin Rudd did in the lead up to the 2007 election, Mr Shorten and the Labor Party got carried away with what they clearly thought was an imminent victory. And so they decided to abandon the caution that opposition leaders usually display. If they want a reminder of just how certain the Labor Party were that they would win the last election, I suggest people reacquaint themselves with what is now a very tragic video clip of Mr Shorten awkwardly telling Arnold Schwarzenegger that he was going to be Australia's next Prime Minister.

In abandoning their prudence, the Labor Party instead embraced a radical far-Left agenda centred around a set of massive tax increases. In total, they went to the election proposing $387 billion in additional taxes. This was not a Labor agenda in the mould of Hawke or Keating; it was a policy agenda much closer to that of Gough Whitlam or even Jeremy Corbyn. Fundamentally, this policy agenda was based on the premise that government bureaucrats, the political class, and in particular Labor MPs themselves, know what is best for the Australian public. In fact, they know so well that they know better than the public what is in their own best interests. Their vision for government was a vision that would disempower Australians, a vision based on the arrogant idea the government knows how to spend money better than the people who put in the hard work to earn it.

This arrogance was in full display when Mr Bowen, the then shadow Treasurer, was questioned about the impact of their $57 billion retirees tax. Let's remember that this was a policy that would have directly affected and damaged the financial security of 900,000 self-funded retirees, many of them on very modest incomes. In fact, 84 per cent of the people who would have been impacted by this tax on retirement savings were on taxable incomes of below $37,000 a year. Disproportionately they were women. How did Chris Bowen respond to the concerns of these Australians? By telling them, 'If you don't like our policies, don't vote for us.'

On one level, I guess, at least that is refreshingly honest. Thankfully, the Australian people did exactly that. So many people abandoned the Labor Party at the last election that their primary vote was the lowest it had ever been in more than 100 years. This election was the most dramatic repudiation of Labor's paternalistic economic policy agenda that is imaginable.

It's worth reflecting briefly on what the Labor Party would have done with this agenda had they in fact been successful at this election. Since the election, they have been advising the government that we should be doing more to stimulate the economy. But their election agenda was about as antistimulatory as it gets. Imagine the consequences for employment and the financial security of all Australians if, at this time of economic uncertainty, their $387 billion plan to increase taxes had been implemented. Thankfully we will never know how damaging that would have been.

One of the groups who abandoned the Labor Party at this election were voters of the faith. To be fair to those opposite, on this issue at least so far there has been some self-reflection on this point. Even Mr Bowen seemed to have changed his tune from the take-it-or-leave it approach mentioned earlier, telling the media that Labor needed to urgently re-engage with religious Australians, many of whom 'no longer feel that progressive politics cares about them.' These are 'people with a social conscience, who want to be included in the progressive movement,' Mr Bowen said.

Anyone who wants to understand why voters of faith are deserting the progressive side in politics in droves needs only to look at the case of Israel Folau. The question of whether Rugby Australia acted within the law in terminating his contract will be determined by the courts. But what we should all be able to agree on is that people shouldn't be fired from their jobs and hounded out of the public square simply for expressing religious beliefs in public. I want to be clear here: personally, I am agnostic. I don't believe that anyone is going to hell. But religious freedom is a fundamental freedom in any free society. It's the only way we can have people of different faiths and, indeed, no faiths live together in relative harmony, as they do in Australia and across much, though not all, of the Western world. Unfortunately, many on the modern left, particularly those who congregate on social media platforms like Twitter, seem to relish searching for anyone who deviates from the dominant progressive orthodoxy, and then doing all that they can to ruin their lives. This is not a recipe for a tolerant, pluralistic society. We're perfectly capable of living among each other, despite our different moral values, if we accept the basic right of our fellow Australians to hold and express their own views on religion or any other question. If we seek to use the state or mob tactics to enforce our own personal moral vision on Australians who don't share it, we will end up bitterly divided and resentful towards each other.

Australians of faith know that it's the Liberal and National parties who are committed to protecting religious freedoms. It is in our political DNA to respect the beliefs and choices of individuals, rather than to dictate to them or to attempt to run their lives. But I am hopeful that the Labor Party will heed the advice of Mr Bowen and others and come to the table with the government in due course to ensure that all Australians' freedoms are protected in this term of parliament.

Personally, I am honoured to have been returned again to represent the people of Victoria as a Liberal senator. It is a rare and special thing to have the opportunity to represent your fellow citizens in this place. I will continue, as I have in my first three years in the Senate, to be a voice for the values of the Liberal cause and to fight to protect the fundamental freedoms of all Australians.