Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Labor's big-government dream is coming to fruition, with nearly half of the country now relying on public sector jobs, welfare, pensions and government contracts. We know that this trend is only going to get worse, with 82 per cent of new jobs created in the past two years being taxpayer funded. That is a dramatic reversal from over 75 per cent of new jobs being private sector jobs under the last term of the coalition. Having low unemployment is a good thing, but it doesn't take a PhD in economics to understand that taxpayer funded jobs are not the answer.

The Treasurer might like to point to statistics to claim that the economy is strong, but Australians living in the real world know better. Around my electorate—and I'm sure it's the same in your electorates, and I do mean across the floor—businesses are doing it tough. They're closing their doors at record rates. You get accustomed to seeing 'vacant' signs popping up in increasingly high numbers.

People and businesses out there are hurting. They know that, under the Labor government, food has gone up 15 per cent; health care, up 15 per cent; education, up 17 per cent; housing, up 19 per cent; rents, up 20 per cent; insurance and financial obligations, up 20 per cent; and—we all know this one because we all feel it—electricity, up 39 per cent, with gas on par at 39 per cent. It's no wonder people are closing their businesses and aren't able to put food on the table after going out and working all week. We now have working poor because of the policies of this government.

In the year to June 2025, real wages grew by just 0.3 per cent, with most of that coming from the public sector pay rises. In simple terms, taxpayers are paying for wage growth. If you work in the private sector, that means that you are paying for bureaucrats' wage increases while your own wage remains flat. How often do you hear that?

And then we see that productivity has gone backwards, under this government, by 5.7 per cent—the lowest in 60 years. Small business, the engine room of the economy, is on the brink, with insolvencies up 57 per cent in 12 months. The productivity roundtable talkfest was just another expense on the taxpayer, with predetermined outcomes. It is shameful.

We've already seen Labor's idea of the productivity plan. It's called Future Made in Australia—a multibillion-dollar ad campaign dressed up as a policy. There's nothing productive or visionary about it. It's just old-school Labor, where politicians and bureaucrats pick the winners and taxpayers pick up the bill. What if, instead of another scheme, the government just stopped making things harder? Wouldn't that be nice? What if it paused the relentless red tape, got out of the way of business and let the private sector lead on jobs and innovation, which they do so well?

We on this side of the floor know this: you don't raise living standards by raising taxes, you don't raise living standards by raising the cost of doing business and you don't raise living standards by increasing the burden on future generations. Australia's prosperity has always come from the hard work of entrepreneurs, innovators, small business and individual workers who get up every day and get on with the job, not from the hand of government. The coalition will back those who take risks, reward effort and investment and clear the path for the private sector to thrive. This is the only way to truly lift wages, ease cost-of-living pressures and build lasting prosperity.

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