Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on this motion, because it is highly misguided. Professor Steven Kates has talked about discussions on what he called the inequality business as a last refuge of the socialists, since everything else they have said has proven to be nonsense.

Where the mistake comes from is the misunderstanding that inequality is about one person taking wealth from someone else. The economic wealth pie is not something that is fixed in science. Wealth creation does not happen haphazardly. It does not happen by accident. We have a wealthy society as the result of individuals adding value to the economy by providing productive services. It is as simple as that. Take the example of the late Steve Jobs, someone who made millions, if not billions, from his innovations. The extra millions that he got did not take money away from the average citizen. They did not take food off the table of the so-called underprivileged. He made the pie bigger for all. Yes, he may have got a bigger slice of that pie, but everyone benefited from his innovations.

There is a fantastic painting just down the corridor. It is Tom Roberts's painting called the Big Picture, and it is a painting of the proclamation of the opening of the first parliament of this country on 9 May 1901 in the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. At the time that was painted, Australia was the richest country in the world, Melbourne was the richest city in the richest country in the world, and the people in that painting were the richest people in the richest city in the richest country in the world. And yet the average citizen today enjoys wealth that is inconceivable to the people in that painting. Despite their wealth, none of them had a car, a computer, a radio or a TV. No-one flew on holidays to Bali. They never had antibiotics or painkillers. The enjoyment of the arts was nothing like what we enjoy today. The thing is that the wealth creation machine that we have—free market capitalism, which I know is a nasty word to you lot, and the reward for entrepreneurship—has been the greatest tool that we have that has alleviated poverty. It has lifted incomes and lifted our society's wealth to beyond what those in that painting could imagine.

But one of the inevitable by-products of that is inequality. But there has always been inequality in all societies. Where we go wrong is concentrating on trying to 'fix' the problem of inequality rather than concentrate on the alleviation of poverty and the growth of real wealth in this economy. Thank goodness those people in that painting back at the Federation of this country understood that. They were other economies, other people and other countries who believed that they should go out. Rather than growing the economy, they wanted to tackle inequality, and we know what happened to those countries. We saw the mistaken policies of the Soviet era, when they were all about inequality. The former Treasurer talks about Animal Farm. Animal Farm was all about, 'We have to lower and reduce inequality.' And always, whenever you try and set out to reduce inequality, all you do is destroy the wealth creation machine that we have. You will lower real living standards. And what do you do? Every society that has gone down that track has made the problem of inequality worse.

The other thing that is mistaken about this motion is that income is not the only thing that matters when considering inequality. You have to consider access to health, education, housing and community safety. Never before in the history of the world has there been so little difference between the lifestyles of the richest billionaires and the poorest people. Sure, people like Bill Gates may have a private plane and they may be able to fly to a tropical island, but the average Australian still has the wealth to do those things.

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