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

It was the Button car plan that led to the death of the car industry, and we are seeing echoes of this again in this Future Made in Australia—a thought bubble, a focus group developed title. I bet it polls well, Senator Farrell. I bet it polls well in those focus groups. But, when you look at the detail and see what it does to the Australian economy, you will know that the last thing you want is this heavy-handed Labor interventionist government getting their hands on this kind of power.

This is absolutely the wrong thing to do at this time. The priorities of this government should all be around the cost of living, improving flexibility in our economy, improving growth in our economy and improving productivity in our economy. When was the last time you heard this government talk about productivity in our economy? They can't, they won't, they don't. They have absolutely nothing positive to say on productivity because they are running the set of instructions that was handed to them when they got into power by the union movement. They are following those instructions blindly, regardless of what the negative impact is on the Australian economy over time.

As I've said, this Future Made in Australia Bill is a slogan searching for a policy, but we do know what that policy will be in the end. It will be a heavily interventionist policy, which is governments picking winners, which is the last thing the Australian economy needs. It doesn't need the amount of waste that will be involved in the spending inherent in this bill. It does not need the level of government involvement that is inherent in this bill. And it certainly does not need the first project, the first cab off the rank, of Future Made in Australia being a future made in America, which is what the first commitment was—it was to an American company. It is quite extraordinary, when you hear the platitudes and the motherhood statements coming from those opposite about how this is about promoting Australia, that the first commitment out of this policy was to an American company.

We need to see a serious plan to combat inflation. We need a serious plan to get productivity improving and increasing in this country. We need a serious plan to get more flexibility into the workplaces in this country. And we need a serious plan to get more incentives into our tax system in this country. The fact is that this bill does absolutely none of those things. It harks back to an old, tired, sad interventionist model that has failed in the past and will fail in the future.

Economist after economist has criticised this policy approach, and I'll go on to talk about that a little bit more in a moment. But this policy, first and foremost, is the wrong policy to take in a cost-of-living crisis. It demonstrates that Labor has its priorities all wrong. After spending the whole of 2023 talking about the Voice instead of the cost of living, Australia was hopeful that in 2024 this government would actually wake up and focus on what it needed to, and that is to get the cost-of-living crisis that is affecting every household in Australia under control. Instead, this is a plan to spend even more money. There's no part of it that makes productivity better. In fact, it probably will end up making productivity significantly worse. And, as I said, it has not gained support from any mainstream economists.

Labor has plenty of handouts for lobbyists and overseas corporations, many of whom have ways to raise finance other than the bank of the government. It's not like these companies do not have other sources of investment. Yet Labor are doing this. They are handing this money out in the first instance to an American based company at a time when Australian families and Australian small businesses are doing it really, really tough. And what will this plan do for those struggling families and small businesses? Absolutely nothing. All those households and all those small businesses who are doing everything they can just to keep their heads above water at the moment would look at this and despair. They would despair that this is the priority of this Labor government—for goodness sake!

We have a government that is failing on the economy. We have a government that had no idea and left all the heavy lifting on inflation up to the Reserve Bank. As a result, we saw the fastest and hardest rise in interest rates certainly in my lifetime if not a heck of a lot longer than that. Living standards and disposable per capita income have gone backwards by 8.7 per cent under this government. That's an 8.7 per cent decline in living standards. That's real disposable income. That's what people really have in their pockets to spend. There's been a decline of 8.7 per cent.

Perhaps even worse than that—and it's hard to believe there's anything worse than that—is the fact that productivity has collapsed by 6.3 per cent under this government, with no plan to see an improvement in that. There's absolutely no plan in this particular bill and in fact a promise of actually making that number even worse. It's quite extraordinary.

Household savings are down 10 per cent. Personal income tax is 25 per cent higher under this government in terms of the total tax take. Interest paid on mortgages has almost tripled under this government. The economy has experienced the slowest GDP growth since the 1990s outside the pandemic. We've seen six consecutive quarters of negative per capita growth. That's the longest per capita recession in 50 years. That is my lifetime—50 years. It's quite extraordinary.

I'm conscious of the time, and I do want to talk about what others have said about this particular piece of legislation. Danielle Wood, the Productivity Commissioner, the government's key economic adviser, appointed by Jim Chalmers, in fact, said:

If we are supporting industries that don't have a long-term competitive advantage, that can be an ongoing cost. It diverts resources, that's workers and capital, away from other parts of the economy where they might generate high value uses.

Again, what's that criticism all about? It's about picking winners. It's a concept that everyone out there understands. It's about a government saying: 'Senator Cadell, I favour you, but, Senator Bragg, your business will get nothing.' It means that Senator Cadell's business gets a leg up in the economy regardless of its economic efficiency, regardless of its productivity and regardless of what it's delivering, and Senator Bragg's business will go down. It will go under because of the government's choices. This is a problem. It's been a constant problem with governments who think that they understand better than markets what the drivers are of economic growth and what the preferences are within the economy. Preferences in the economy are revealed preferences, and picking winners is a recipe for destroying capital and destroying productivity over time.

Danielle Wood went on to say:

We risk creating a class of businesses that is reliant on government subsidies, and that can be very effective in coming back for more.

She went on to say:

Your infants grow up, they turn into very hungry teenagers and it's kind of hard to turn off the tap.

You get businesses dependent on these government handouts. With businesses that are potentially in a marginal seat is any Labor government going to say, 'No, we're going to turn off the tap now'? Do you really think that is going to happen? Of course they're not. So you get inefficiencies in the economy that a Labor government will be too gutless to get rid of. It will inevitably breed a reliance on government among the business community which is counterproductive and has been seen through generations to be significantly counterproductive. You will see an unseemly linkage between business and government that in a Western democracy should not exist. It creates a sense of reliance that is the breeding ground for corruption, and we need to be extraordinarily careful in this country that we do not go down this path. Governments picking winners is never going to have a good outcome.

I say again that this was a slogan dreamt up before it had a policy behind it. It's very clearly something that should have been in an episode of The Hollowmen. Sadly, though, instead we see it coming out of the mouths of this Labor government—a government that doesn't have any clue about the economic management of this country.