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

Well, there you have it from the Greens: the statement of their principles—keep the coalition out of government so they can prop up the Labor Party and have the tail wagging the dog to enact the Greens' economy destroying policies. That is what we will see after the next election unless the Australian people understand the impact of this kind of approach on our economy and actually reflect on what this Labor-Greens alliance has done over the last 2½ years and the damage that it will wreak on the rest of the Australian economy if given the chance to govern in alliance once again.

I am going to start today, as I usually have to in these debates, sadly, not talking directly about the bill but by addressing some of the misinformation that comes out of the other side in their contributions, because there is some egregious rewriting of history going on over the other side. The first one I want to address is the idea that we hear over and over again—this insulting idea that Western Australian mining industry is just digging and shipping. 'Digging and shipping' is the phrase they use—you just get a shovel, put something on a boat and that's it. Port Hedland is one of the top-10 largest ports in the world. I would encourage all my colleagues to go and visit it. It is a logistical exercise that is an absolutely extraordinary achievement of people who had vision, people who were able to organise an extraordinary physical undertaking of moving that quantity of material in a 10-metre tidal zone, where you have less than a metre between the bottom of those boats and the channel through which they pass, less than two metres on either side. I have seen those boats because I've been to Port Hedland now a number of times. I would encourage all my colleagues to go and look to understand the extraordinary logistical exercise that encompasses Port Hedland port. If you drive through the Pilbara, down the highway from Broome, through Newman and past Mount Magnet, you will see the extraordinary undertakings of the mining industry right along that road in what is one of the most remote places on this planet. If you go to Perth and you go to some of the control facilities where remote mining equipment is being controlled from Perth with remotely operated machinery, robotic trucks, you will see high-paid, high-skilled jobs in the mining industry of Western Australia. So to characterise it as 'digging and shipping' is an insult to every single one of those West Australians involved in our great visionary and technologically sophisticated mining industry. We are world leaders. We are the best in the world at this industry, and that shouldn't be something that we take for granted. It shouldn't be something we dismiss with a glib three-word phrase. This is the engine room of the Western Australian and the Australian economy. There is no doubt about that.

The other piece of misinformation from the other side that I am going to correct, because I think it is important and does reflect on why we oppose this bill, is this nonsense that the coalition were responsible for the demise of the Australian car industry. The Button car plan was responsible for the demise of the Australian car industry. The Button car plan, the Labor Party car plan, of the 1980s entrenched in that industry the union inefficiency that eventually killed it. The Button car plan forced manufacturers to work together to share their technology. So, when you went out and bought a Holden Apollo, you were actually buying a Toyota Camry. They were exactly the same; they just had different badges on them. When you went out to buy a Holden Nova, it was a Toyota Corolla with a different badge on it. This was the Labor Party's car plan. If you went out and bought a Holden Commodore, it was a Toyota Lexcen. This was the Labor Party's car plan. They forced the companies to collude. They forced the companies to share bodies. They forced the companies to share engines. They forced the companies to share drive trains. They entrenched union presence in those plants, and that is what drove the Australian car industry into massive inefficiency, which meant that, in the end, it could not compete globally. It had no chance of competing globally and had no chance of procuring the financial resources needed to invest the capital needed to maintain its place in the world's supply chains.

The Labor Party was the death knell of the Australian car industry through overregulation, through overreliance on their mates in the union movement and through forcing companies to try and collude to share engines, to share drive trains and to share bodies. It was a centralised attempt at controlling the Australian economy that failed, because picking winners always fails. Control from the centre always fails over time. It might work for a little while, but, in the end, it fails, because governments cannot make the same judgements over time that markets do. They will make bad decisions. They will find an industry that happens to be in a marginal seat that they start supporting with the best of intentions, perhaps, but, in the end, they cannot withdraw support for that industry, because it will hurt them politically, and that's what you're setting up here. You're picking one particular part of the Australian economy to give this largesse to and to give these taxpayer funded tax breaks to—just one part of the economy. You're not saying to the whole economy: 'Come out. Come and get it. Here's your opportunity; show us the best and the brightest, and we will support that.' No. They're picking winners in the economy, and that is what has always failed throughout the economy history of the last two or three hundred years. One thing that you can bank on is that governments stepping in like this will create failures. It's sad that we see this continual return and continual retreading of this same ground, over and over again.

One of the things that was talked about when this idea was being ventilated, was being talked about, in this place, was how important it was because of what was happening in other countries—particularly in the United States, with the Inflation Reduction Act. Well, the new administration in the US has paused funding to, paused spending on, the Inflation Reduction Act. So, if that was one of the chief justifications, that's just been blown out of the water. That should never have been a justification anyway, because you are never going to make Australia's economy strong by chasing other economies down their rabbit holes. It's never going to work.

If we want the Australian economy to be strong, we've got to do those things that we know support businesses to invest and be the most productive they can be. And how do we do that? We do that through mechanisms to support broad-scale investment where the companies, the businesses—the small businesses, the medium businesses, the large businesses—have to make an investment decision in their own best interests, such as the instant asset write-off. That's a very important policy, and one that I certainly have championed from this side because it really does give support to those businesses who see an opportunity, no matter what they are—whether they're in an industry that this government decides it wants to pick as a winner, or whether they're a small cafe who wants to invest in a new, more efficient washing machine or cooking apparatus or billing system, or whether they're a small business who sees an opportunity in buying an extra ute to do deliveries with because maybe it's slightly larger, so it can take a little more, or it's slightly more fuel efficient. Things like this, and decisions made by individual businesses, will fuel the productivity improvements we'll need into the future.

Under this government, we have seen not just the extraordinary damage done to business by the ratcheting up of inflation, the ratcheting up of interest rates, the massive spike in the cost of living and the massive spike in the cost of doing business in this country. We have seen also a plummeting, a falling off the cliff, of Australian productivity. And that does need to be addressed. I absolutely admit that productivity is one of the key challenges for any government. But this bill isn't going to do it. In fact, through the mechanisms in this bill, we are actually going to see, quite frankly, potentially, things going in the opposite direction.

I have spoken before in this place about how this bill has its own Orwellian name, 'Future Made in Australia'. It's a name that sounds to me very much like it was developed by a focus group—and it will be very interesting if that ever comes to light! I suspect it was. But then, within that, we have these 'community benefits principles'—again, a very Orwellian phrase because it really means: What is Labor going to impose on those businesses? What boxes are those businesses going to have to tick to satisfy their Labor government masters to get this money? What does that mean in terms of this government satisfying the wishes of the union movement? It has done that from day one. From the day this government was elected, its main, driving, intellectual rationale has been: 'What does the union movement want, and how can we get it done?' So, once again, we are going to see those sorts of principles embedded in these Orwellianly-titled 'community benefit principles'. We don't know what they're going to look like, because they're going to be made up in regulation after the event. So we don't know what they're going to look like. The companies don't know what they're going to look like. And, quite frankly, it's just another layer of red tape that's being imposed on these businesses.

So, on the one hand, you've got this government putting in place new workplace relations laws, new environmental approvals, the safeguard mechanism, changes to company tax, and making things harder on business, and then, on the other, they're trying to give a handout to a very small part of the economy. But the fact is that what we should be doing is trying to help the whole economy. We should be trying to help all parts of business, particularly the small and medium businesses that are under so much pressure at the moment.