Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Five per cent is low compared with the return that the Future Fund presently enjoys of approximately 13 per cent for the previous financial year. The static wage growth one sees today is because Labor never encouraged or supported these bold but better investments. Investing in science and technology will be the rock star performer for our economy.

It is true to say today that I am concerned. I am concerned today that business and consumers are losing confidence. I am concerned that they are becoming less optimistic. But I am not concerned in any way with the knowledge the coalition has a better plan for Australia. This government is listening to small business, families, and first home buyers. It is not only listening but also delivering real solutions: a childcare package, a small business package and a policy to assist first home buyers. This is on top of delivering three free trade agreements with our biggest trading partners and biggest world markets.

The surest sign of confidence is the ability to recognise that there are better approaches and ideas elsewhere. Ours is a confident, mature nation. We should embed this notion of benchmarking in all our policy discussions. This coalition government has created the first one-stop shop for environmental approvals. In the coming times, I hope that the same accessibility and simplicity is applied to enterprise supports and job creation. Australia, and Western Australia, would stand to benefit from a one-stop shop on job creation. In the UK and Ireland there are websites where those seeking to employ workers or start a business can access from one place all the government support and regulation applicable to them. This is what the public expects of a modern government. This is what the business community are asking of us.

Innovation and invention need to be the watchwords of government. When people are asked on the street what the Liberals stand for and what the Abbott government stands for, let it be innovation and invention—because there is nothing so wrong with Australia that it cannot be fixed by what is right with Australia. We have the cream of the crop here in Australia and vast resources of every kind to turn idea into reality.

Confidence can be an ephemeral thing. It builds slowly. Confidence, like trust, takes time—it goes up the stairs. Hopelessness happens in an instant—it jumps out the window. One starts to get a sense of the confidence of the nation and the hopefulness of the nation when looking at the savings rates. The current trend we observe of an uptick in the savings rate, each time testing a new relative high, is indicative of a nation with money but unsure and uneasy of what lies ahead. It is the job of government to assuage those fears and to point the way ahead. After all, is that not at the heart of leadership? A leader sees what lies ahead and presents this vision to his or her people, and we all get in the same boat.

I believe the pivot of this debate is where we are going as a nation. The question is the bread and butter of any politician. However, to answer it we need to know where we have come from and have a debate about priorities and importance. In getting the budget to surplus, there are two models of growth for Australia to pursue: the high-immigration, relatively low productivity pathway, or a lower immigration and higher productivity, higher value path. High-migration models put huge pressures on central government to provide services and infrastructure. This low-hanging fruit approach to growth is not ideal if the objective is to get back to a no-debt position as soon as possible. Indeed, this is why the Labor years were so criminal and so terrible. Labor, then as now, lacked a border protection plan. Its approach is more ham-fisted than iron-fisted. It cost us then and costs us now in debt and interest repayments.

The coalition plan is clear and consistent—one message; one story; one plan. Our government is taking tough decisions to protect our nation and secure a prosperous future. This includes asking questions of foreign investment. Everyone on the coalition side knows that foreign investment is absolutely essential to Australia. It has been in the past and will be in the future. There are questions, though, about why we allow speculative investment by foreigners in residential housing markets. Australia's foreign investment policy for residential real estate is designed to increase Australia's housing stock. More efficacious would be to address the issue of land supply and release. Foreign capital would be better spent investing in wealth-creating infrastructure or research, or even industrial real estate. Our government will ask the hard questions because it is the right thing to do by the Australian people.

Innovative low-cost solutions are all around, and one such road is our national R&D spend. Again, using benchmarking we should acknowledge efforts elsewhere in the R&D space, such as the EU Lisbon agenda—a treaty to become the world's most innovative and dynamic area by committing governments to spending at minimum three per cent of GDP on R&D—and try to better that. Setting aspirational national goals is the low-hanging fruit of leadership. It costs nothing and should be done more often. Paint the picture. Point the way.

Another low-hanging fruit is getting more women back into the workforce. Increasing the overall participation rate, especially increasing the female participation rates, will help grow the economy. However, only this government is serious about taking real action on child care. Labor offered a 50 per cent rebate with no average fee guidance. Lo and behold, today we observe that average fees for child care have increased by 50 per cent. This sort of half-hearted, careless policymaking is over. The coalition government understands that accessibility and affordability of child care is one of the biggest issues facing families across Australia. Supporting families to stay in work and get back to work when they have children enables them to create more economic opportunities for their own families and for the nation. This is why one of the first actions taken by the coalition government was to ask the Productivity Commission to inquire into future options for child care and early childhood learning.

It is not in child care alone that the Abbott government is being brave. The government is carefully considering every recommendation of Professor Ian Chubb's 2014 landmark report, STEM: Australia's future, which called for a national strategy to align research, education, international engagement and innovation to boost the country's competitiveness. I welcome this and look forward to concrete announcements in this space soon. Productivity improves through innovation, and the country needs engineers, scientists and technologists to innovate. We need to have an improved level of STEM to ensure we are competing at the knowledge end of the economy. Currently, we are the 19th largest economy in the world; a PwC report, The world in 2050, has predicted that, without investment in skills and a move away from resources, Australia could slip to 29th position by 2050. Only this coalition government has a plan to secure our long-term competiveness and standard of living. The challenge ahead is the question of how to become more competitive without becoming more unequal, and STEM has a part to play in this equation.

I see that my time is short, so I would say that the way that government makes a profit to square off this equation has not been rapidly increasing. In the final analysis, our place in the world and our quality of life need to be earned every day.

See this speech in context