Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry—Spence. Pardon me. See? I'm out of here for a while, and then everything changes! A principal from Elanora Heights, Leesa Martin, has taken the money that this government has created through grants to invest in STEM, in robots and in 3D printers. She has a robot club that has a list of students waiting to get in. How many schools do you know of that have students wanting to go into the classroom in lunchtime?

Leesa Martin and her excellent teachers at Elanora Heights have created that outcome. Then we have Pittwater House and Northern Beaches Christian School which this year sent four economics students to see the budget—by the way, unlike those opposite, they thought it was very good. They got to see how this place works and the great clearing house of ideas that this chamber presents. They are doing us proud, and I know that the future of this nation is in good hands with students like those.

Then we have the employee share scheme changes, which reverse out what the Labor Party so erroneously and egregiously did nine years ago by making people pay tax on shares they are yet to receive. The damage to our innovation, the damage to our start-up culture will never actually be recovered. But this government bit the bullet. We have made changes to employee share schemes. These changes will benefit innovative companies like PharmaCare and Blackmores, like John Bacon's Budburst, like Brett Crowther's Incat Crowther. Incat Crowther has not only built ferries for Sydney Harbour but has designed the next generation of landing vessels for the US Navy and scored a US$750 million project by doing that. These enterprising entrepreneurs will be able, for the first time, to sensibly offer their employees shares that mean that they can own and be part of the wealth that they are creating.

For Blackmores and PharmaCare, for Budburst, we have created a patent box that means that, when you create an invention that you can patent, you don't need to go overseas to raise those funds. You can stay here in Australia, and any income you derive from that patent is at a lower tax rate because that's what we believe in. We believe in empowering people right around Australia to do the best that they possibly can, so that they are encouraged and incentivised to innovate, to employ, to invest and to make a difference in our society. When you grow your economy, you have more resources to fund the essential services that ordinary Australians, the hardworking Australians, hardworking families, rely upon to get on with their lives.

My area is a great area. We single-handedly this year saved Christmas for the rest of Australia and we're very proud of that. But there are still some things, in the luckiest part of the luckiest country in the world, that we would like. One is road upgrades. Too many families spend too much time in traffic congestion trying to get to work and trying to get home to be with their loved ones. Upgrades to Wakehurst Parkway are essential. The commencement of the NorthConnex tunnel is essential. These are things that will make a real difference to families in my electorate, who are the ones that go to work, that pay the taxes, that fund all these essential services that so many Australians have come to rely on.

Also, housing prices on the northern beaches and right across Australia are too high. It is simply inexcusable, in a country with the highest minimum wage in the world, with the highest wages in the world, in the least densely populated continent in the world outside the penguins of the South Pacific, that we have housing prices more commensurate with Singapore and Hong Kong than with Kansas and Nebraska. The reason is clear: it is that too many state governments have too many restrictive planning laws. This is a regulatory failure of enormous proportions. I call on this parliament to start lobbying state governments to do more to create more houses, so that more Australians can have their fair share of the Australian dream. It is both unreasonable and unfair that we have not done this earlier. It is critical to the future of our nation that we achieve this outcome because, while ever people do not own their own homes then we own them, and that's not what Australia was built to do. It was built to empower people, to make families better off and to make the lives of ordinary Australians even better.

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