Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) | Hansard source

It's great to be back and to be talking about such an important issue: productivity. The latest national accounts data shows that we're seeing the biggest slump in labour productivity since records began. And in the first year of the Albanese government, productivity growth has dropped to a historic low of minus 4.6 per cent. So, it's fallen off a cliff. Perhaps now that Wayne Swan's former chief of staff and the Treasurer's old boss, Chris Barrett, has been appointed as the chair of the Productivity Commission there might finally be a meeting to discuss its five-yearly Productivity Commission report that was released way back in March.

The government's indifference to the productivity challenge should alarm all Australians, because it shows an indifference to the challenges that Australians are facing—for example, the first tranche of industrial relations reforms. It's a war on employers, introducing multi-employer bargaining, and next is 'same job, same pay'. The government has forged ahead, introducing disastrous energy price caps that are strangling our manufacturing and resources industries and pumping the economic accelerator, with $185 billion of additional spending in the budget. And after a year in office interest rates have risen 11 times, energy bills are sky high, the cost of living is a struggle for millions of Australians, real wages are going backwards and inflation is beyond the target range.

What response do we get? We get a really glossy report—it's beautiful, actually—called Measuring what matters. It's a report that looks good, but it's using data that's two years old, telling us how well we used to be doing. I don't know who was in government then, but you could look it up! It's classic head-in-the sand stuff, and we need to be bolder about our challenges and how we approach them—like the target of $100 billion in national agricultural value by 2030, which is bold and achievable, and the Nationals were pleased to get behind it when in government.

I draw your attention to a recent report commissioned by Hort Innovation and delivered by the Centre for International Economics. Horticulture is obviously a very important industry in my electorate. The Economic contribution of Australian horticulture report predicts the sector will achieve a 22.5 per cent increase in combined value by 2030, to reach $21.8 billion. The chair of the NFF Horticulture Council, Jolyon Burnett, said:

The horticulture sector, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and also our turf, nursery and garden industries, has experienced solid growth over many years, backed by strong demand and innovation, with this trend set to continue.

Horticulture and food processing is such an important pillar of the economy, particularly in my electorate. I'll share a few insights from the report. For every dollar of value the horticulture industry generates, an additional 27.6c is injected into the economy. For every 100 jobs that exist in Australian horticulture, 21 more jobs are created in the support sectors, such as wholesale, trade, retail, transport and construction.

These projected productivity increases, which benefit all Australians, are under threat. So those opposite need to work with employers to end the energy price caps and embrace lower, incentive based tax measures instead of hiking taxes on franking credits, superannuation and investors. Businesses in my electorate need access to workers to fill the labour skills gaps. We had a program called the ag visa, which those opposite have scrapped, and employers who want to increase their productivity using foreign labour are finding it very hard to operate now because there's not enough Australian labour around.

To conclude, I want to talk about probably the biggest threat to productivity in my region and across Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, and that is the disastrous policy in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. To rip out of the basin water that is used highly efficiently to grow clean, green produce that we consume here and export to Southeast Asia and beyond—great industries thrive in the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of being able to use the water in the rivers for irrigation. We have given so much back to the environment, and Labor want to take more of it. I can't think of anything that smashes productivity more than ripping away the water that's used to grow food and export and manufacture food. I think it's appalling, and I think those opposite should rethink their whole approach to the policy.

See this speech in context