Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The cost-of-living bill. All it does is add to the bonfire of inflation.

I was doing some bedtime reading last night and looking at some of the greatest hits of Paul Keating, the revered leader on the other side of parliament. One of Paul Keating's great insights was that wage rises needed to be accompanied by productivity increases, and he saw that enterprise bargaining and workplace flexibility were the key to delivering these productivity increases. But what we've got in Labor's legislative agenda is only going to wind back enterprise bargaining, reduce workplace flexibility and detract from productivity. What we've seen here is a Labor government of old, losing sight of their proud legacy of economic reform and returning to the state based industrial reallocation systems of the 1970s.