Economy
Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (11:19): I will miss the member for Moreton. I’ll miss him terribly. He knows my personal regard for him, but there’s much to be made of this particular speech. I will just take issue with one of the points made by the member for Moreton, and it might show the lack of economic clarity that this government has demonstrated. During our last term of government productivity growth was at 1.2 per cent. Under this government, it has gone backwards. It went backwards, initially, 6.3 per cent; it’s now back up to about 5.2—a very small recovery. That’s worse. But 1.2, going up—that’s improving. Going down is worse. So, when he makes the argument that there was some great problem under our side, just put some facts into it. To those in the gallery listening: ‘Trust, but verify.’ It’s a great line from Ronald Reagan. Listen to this stuff, but then go and have a look at the facts. The RBA has all of this data; it’s readily available to you. They talk to you about productivity, but it has gone backwards, at the greatest rate since we’ve measured productivity, under this government. That is an extraordinary statistic.
It’s not only that. We find ourselves at a time when the national accounts show the lowest growth, outside of the COVID period, since the nineties. We’re in the sixth quarter of a GDP per capita recession. And, just to make things worse, to ram this down further, core inflation in Australia is higher than it is in every comparable economy around the world—in the US, the UK, Canada, Japan and the Euro area. We are in a really bad situation right now, and it is not a situation which can be pointed to as being some global phenomenon that is the result of—I don’t know—Vladimir Putin over in Russia, or Houthi rebels in the straits over there, or the RBA. I’ll get to the RBA, if they want to blame them more. To his eternal credit, the shadow Treasurer hasn’t chosen to attack the RBA governor, and I think that’s a wise move. At this point, I don’t think these attacks will play out too well in the long run.
We’re in a terrible situation, and, if there were one metric by which you could genuinely address cost of living in Australia, it would be productivity. When we have productivity growth, we have real wage growth. To take an example of that, look at the mining sector. It’s a highly productive industry and it has highly paid workers. The more productive it gets, the more it can pay its workers. That’s how it works. And it’s the same in an industry as it is across the economy.
So you’ve got these incredible challenges weighing down Australia. The big question for government is: what do you do about it? Sadly, Labor has chosen, deliberately, a series of policies that have made our productivity numbers worse.
When you put on an additional 36,000 public servants, all of whom are working at a lower productivity rate than those in the private sector, you will see productivity across the board go down. That’s just how averages and numbers work.
When you kill off a gold mine in a highly productive industry like mining, you are changing the balance—you are stopping that high-productivity work coming into the economy. That’s what this government is doing.
They’ve introduced IR legislation that every industry group across the country has slammed for attacking productivity. The Minerals Council of Australia, Master Builders, the BCA, COSBOA—everyone who has been asked on this issue has said: ‘Yes, this legislation will make things worse.’ When you introduce stuff like that, you are sending clear signals to the market: ‘We are not interested in increasing productivity. That is not our focus.’
The government demonises casual employment, which is a choice that Australians make. Let’s go back to the numbers. The conversion rate, when you force someone to go from casual to full-time, is about nine per cent. That’s the percentage of people who choose to go across. Nine per cent of casual workers choose to go to full-time employment, when forced on that question.
So we’ve got a government that has taken a series of actions that have made things worse and will continue to make things worse. And this is on them. I would argue that, in these conditions—the biggest fall in productivity we’ve ever seen—these are the wrong choices.
What will we do? We will support highly productive industries. We will support employees’ choice of casual employment. We’ll bring back the flexibility and simplicity to IR that have been stripped away by this government.
