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

It's disappointing we don't have another Labor speaker on this motion. However, we will push on. This motion and the contributions by the Labor members during this debate show us the fundamental flaw in the Labor strategy, their policy and their ideology. The one thing that they seem not to understand is that the size of the economic pie that we have in this nation is not fixed. It can rise, it can shrink and it can grow, depending on the policies that the government of the day has. Where we have policies that encourage and provide incentives for firms to go out there and invest their capital and take risks and experiment—experiment with new ideas, new products and new methods of production and distribution—some of those ideas will work. When we do that, they are grabbed and expanded, and that's what grows the economy.

If it wasn't like that and the economy was a fixed size, it would be very easy. You could just cut it up, redistribute it into equal pieces and have their so-called fair go for everyone. But that's not how an economy works. The very minute that you go in and start redistributing the pie, you actually destroy the incentives that created the wealth and created the size of that pie in the first place. This is why we see Labor governments having all these grand ideas and these grandiose spending promises. But, when they come to deliver them, the only way they can do so is to borrow more money and put this nation further in debt.

A great example is the anticoal rhetoric that we hear around the place. It seems to be no coincidence that those who run around and make the loudest noise, saying, 'I wants more spending for schools,' and, 'I want more spending for hospitals,' and, 'I want more spending for aged-care centres,' are the very same people who go around demonising coal. Fine, close down our coalmines. But this year thermal coal will generate $22½ billion worth of exports and metallurgical coal, which often gets forgotten, will generate another $35 billion worth of exports. The royalties alone, flowing into the state government coffers, are $6 billion. That's enough to employ something like 80,000 nurses. So, if you want to go around and run anticoal rhetoric and say you want to close down all these mines, what you are doing is saying, 'We're going to pull $6 billion out of state royalties,' and that gives them $6 billion less to pay for schools and hospitals.

We see the same with the company tax cuts. We've had to argue and fight to get Labor, fighting and screaming, to agree to reduce the corporate rate of tax, and we've only been able to do it for companies with a turnover of up to $50 million. It should have been unambiguous to do it for all companies. They talk about what Paul Keating did. They were the reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments. They reduced company tax for everyone because they knew that it was important to make our nation internationally competitive, to attract capital and to grow the economy. If you look at the evidence—whether it was Paul Keating or Peter Costello—every single government in this nation that has reduced the rate of company tax hasn't ended up with less taxation revenue; they grew the economy and, at the end of the day, the governments had more taxation revenue. So, even though it seems counterintuitive, with a lower rate of corporate tax the government gets more gross tax revenue, which gives us more money to pay for all those things that we so desperately need.

We've heard Labor speaking today, talking about Labor's policy on negative gearing. It is a dangerous policy that will drive house prices down and will drive rents up. It has been tried before; it has failed before. It will fail again, and I call on Labor members to get rid of that policy.

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