Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

In the face of some of the political rhetoric and game playing that goes on, particularly from that side, I want to talk about some real Australians, real people.

Hamish is a dairy farmer in my electorate. He gets up at 4.30 every morning and milks approximately 500 cows. In the winter it's icy cold in the dairy. It's dirty. There are a lot of flies in the summer. At 3 pm he gets the cows in and does it all again. It's tough work, but he loves it. He loves producing clean, healthy food for Australia. After the afternoon milking, he goes out again and irrigates his paddocks, sometimes well into the night. Hamish is really worried that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan changes by this government will reduce the amount of irrigation water and push prices up, making dairy farming even more difficult. Hamish pays a lot of tax, and the produce earns a lot of tax for Australia when it's exported.

Matt is a fruit grower. He pays a lot of tax. He works really hard, and he barely sleeps during the harvest season. The energy bills for his coolstores, required to run 24/7, are going through the roof. His employee is originally from India. He works long hours, earning good money, to get ahead in his new country, and he pays a lot of tax.

Tom is from Gunnedah. He manages an engineering firm that does a lot of work for mining and energy companies. He works seven days a week and endures a lot of stress, with the price of everything going up, and that's been getting a lot worse in the last three years. He pays a lot of tax.

When the government indulges in wasteful spending and threatens private enterprises, I want those opposite to think about Hamish, Matt and Tom and their employees, and all those people paying tax and doing difficult jobs that are essential to Australia's economic prosperity. The philosophy of this government is that everything is free. But nothing is truly free; someone has to pay for it, and often it's the blood, sweat and tears of Australians taking a risk, working incredibly hard in difficult conditions and paying a lot of tax. We should respect those people.

Our philosophy is that you grow the economy, and to grow the economy you've got to have a competitive private sector. There needs to be a culture in this country of enabling private industry to thrive and employ people. We should not create a system where more and more people are reliant on governments distributing taxes to get by. Every day in this place, in question time, all the government seem to do is brag about spending taxpayers' money as if it is theirs, but it was earned by other people.

Some of the spending we agree with. Some of it's good. A lot of it's wasteful. Who pays? And how are we looking after the industries that provide us with those tax dollars? Those industries are suffering because, when government spending gets unsustainable and it goes up four times faster than the economy is growing, we get inflationary pressures, and those put more pressure on business. The economic health of this country is in a really difficult place, and the trajectory is not good, because everything's going up. The inputs are going up, and I don't see policies to help bring them down—and energy is a classic example.

Energy is the economy. And, as I've said in this place before, renewable energy is good technology. It's great technology. But it needs to be part of a diverse mix in the grid. And, as I've talked about, the Centre for Independent Studies reports that it's good at about 30 per cent, but, when it gets near 60 per cent, prices go up. If prices are going up, businesses can't be competitive. And, if businesses can't be competitive, Hamish, Matt and Tom can't be profitable. And, if they're not profitable, they're not paying tax. And, if they're not paying tax, where's Labor going to get money to hand out and then brag about during question time? I would just like you to respect and think about the Hamishs, the Matts and the Toms of this world, who do hard jobs, pay tax, create private enterprise, employ people and keep this country going. Don't waste their hard earned dollars.

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