Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I feel an affinity for the member for Capricornia, myself coming from the country originally. I'm a Broken Hill boy; it's where I spent many years. The member representing the great city of Broken Hill is here as well. While I share an affinity on a personal and perhaps a geographical level, I think there might be a philosophical divergence in Australian politics that we haven't seen for a long time. Some of the comments made in that speech, I think, really outline what that philosophical difference is.

I feel like I woke up in an alternate universe where the member for Goldstein is somehow the alternative Treasurer of this country. He is somebody who I'm not sure would fit in particularly well in the rural electorates that many of you here represent, where I come from, and I think he would struggle in the outer metropolitan electorate that I represent today. I feel like there is a bit of an alternate universe where people on the other side see the member for Goldstein as having some economic answers. Maybe it is that there is this philosophical difference in Australian politics. I think we've really seen a divergence in that over the last 10 years or perhaps a little bit more.

With the member for Goldstein I think we have one of the most radical, if not the most radical, assistant Treasurers when it comes to their personal philosophy. I sort of understand that philosophy. And I do want to use this speech to talk a little bit about that, because where the government spends its money is the best indication of what the government's values actually are. So this is a good opportunity to talk about values, talk about philosophy and talk about the sorts of values that I did learn growing up in Broken Hill—where you look after your community, where you look after your mate and where you work hard and expect a return on that work. In Broken Hill you've always got to remember that you are fighting as a community. You're fighting for the person next to you, and you don't want to leave that community behind. They would find the sort of philosophy that the member for Goldstein, the shadow Treasurer, professes to be a very sterile ideology.

I think that where the government spends its money is really an indication of what that philosophy is. That's why I think where the government prioritises its spending in housing, energy, training, health—and mental health particularly—and infrastructure really brings to my mind that saying that you should run a country the same way that you run a business. I've also run a business. I started off as a contract musterer around Broken Hill—not the biggest business—where I had a bike, a ute, a pack of dogs and the will to win. The most important thing that you need in any business is the will to win. From there we moved to the city, when we had a little baby, and I ended up running a construction company. I really learnt some things along the way, and I want to talk about that in a second.

One thing I learnt is that there are two ways to run a business: you can strip the profits out, run the business into the ground, put off the investment and put off the maintenance; or you can invest in your plant and your people. The way that the Liberal Party and the National Party used to run their political philosophy was that they used to invest in the plant and they used to invest in their people. That is where I think we are now seeing a divergence. The member for Goldstein, the shadow Treasurer, has a fundamental philosophy which I'll get into in a second. I do understand it; I do get it. Ultimately that philosophy is about neglecting to invest in your plant, your people, your housing, your energy, your training, your infrastructure, your health system and the mental health of your people. That's why this next election is really going to be about that big difference in philosophical approaches.

I went from contract mustering to running a construction company, but there was something that happened in between. This is where I get the member for Goldstein. I'd imagine the National Party would probably not sign up to his economic philosophy, being the agrarian socialists that I think many of you still are. There was a bit of time there between contract mustering and running a construction company where I got to hone my own political philosophy. We went when we had a baby—my partner wasn't going to live in the outback of New South Wales, so we moved to Tenterfield, where I worked in a service station. I was flipping burgers and serving petrol in my early 30s. My partner gave me a book on getting from nought to $5 million in five years. I thought: 'Geez, this book's a heap of rubbish. It's one of these get-rich-quick books.' By the time I read it, I was hooked because it wasn't about getting rich; it was about this philosophy of taking personal responsibility for your own decisions and realising that the choices you make have consequences. It said that if you change the way you look at the world, you can change your environment and you can take that responsibility. I would say it rounded out a political philosophy I developed through the Labor Party, which is a bit more about that collective action—that governments can solve all the problems. Sometimes that's right, and sometimes that's not right. Anyway, that book began a journey for me where I ended up reading about 160 or so of those business books. I wanted to run my own business, and fundamentally what I wanted to do with that business was help businesses teach their workers financial responsibility and some of those things I had learned.

I get where the member for Goldstein is coming from in his philosophy. He has this aggressively individualist approach to people making choices in their own lives to control their own destiny, and says government shouldn't get involved in that. I get that; I understand where he's coming from. But there's a point at which something like that becomes utterly ideological and not founded in reality, and there's a point where that becomes un-useful to the rest of society.

On superannuation, this week the government is building on its superannuation policy, which is very much a Labor Party policy. In those books I was reading, one of the philosophies was that you pay yourself first: you put 10 per cent of your income and you pay yourself first no matter what, because over time you can build up that pool of savings from just a pile of money—which can be there for security if you need it—to a pile of assets, effectively, that you can invest to create a passive income. I understand that argument that you should pay yourself first. But the reality is that life gets in the way. If it wasn't for a compulsory superannuation system that took 10 per cent and put that 10 per cent away for workers, there wouldn't be $4.3 trillion worth of national savings for people to retire on. There would be people retiring into poverty, just as there was prior to superannuation.

In politics you have to be pragmatic. The ideological purity doesn't work. It didn't work for the Labor Party in the 1950s and 1960s, and it's not working for the Liberal and National parties today. I'm sure there are sensible people in those parties. I have a personal affinity for people from the bush; they reside mainly in the National Party. I say to them: for the sake of the country, encourage your colleagues—particularly the shadow Treasurer—to drop this ideological obsession with this personal free market approach to economics. As attractive as it might look on paper, it would not work to the extent where you would end up with the pool of savings that we have for superannuation—and it has not worked over the last 30 or so years that prime ministers such as John Howard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison have followed the approach of the government withdrawing itself from providing essential services like housing and energy.

There are probably two things that I really want to come to this place to prosecute. There are two economic arguments that I want to come to this place to prosecute, and those are cheap public housing and cheap public energy. In many ways, that was the postwar economic miracle, the economic recipe of Australia—cheap public housing and cheap public energy. There was cheap public housing not just for people that desperately needed it but for railway workers, for meat workers, for teachers, for car workers.

In fact, I like to shock people a little bit by saying that one of my economic role models was Thomas Playford, who was the Premier of South Australia and Australia's longest-serving premier, who served from the 1940s to the 1970s. He was a Liberal premier who built the South Australian Housing Trust and who put into the charter of the South Australian Housing Trust that it would aid in the economic development of the state. At one point, the high point in Australia, something like 40 per cent of every rental in South Australia was for public housing for car workers. That's how they built the car industry. It wasn't just the reduction in tariffs that destroyed the car industry; it was the cost of housing going up, meaning that wages had to go up. Actually, that didn't help business in the end. The whole idea about public housing was that you could take the pressure off wages. You could then attract international manufacturing companies like the car industry to South Australia and Australia.

But it wasn't just Liberal Party premiers, of course; it was the philosophy at the time. This is what I'm trying to say. There used to be this sort of agreement between Labor and Liberal that the government had a role to play in the economy for the good of the economy, not just out of the goodness of our hearts but because it was actually the economically sensible thing to do. So it was with energy. We built great public energy assets in this country. Just to surprise people, I don't just go around quoting premiers of Australia from ancient history; I like to quote Peter Dutton, somebody who's been in the news a bit lately, in a certain report. Amongst all of the things Peter Dutton said that I would disagree with, I thought he summed up the importance of energy perfectly when he said that energy is not just part of the economy; energy is the economy. It absolutely is the economy.

Australia's postwar economic miracle was built on those two foundations: cheap public housing and cheap public energy, but the ideological obsession that the opposition has had with withdrawing itself from the market has seen energy infrastructure privatised, corporatised and ultimately wither away to nothing. Coal-fired power stations closed all around the place, but they weren't replaced. What I don't get is this ideological obsession against renewable energy. I just don't get it, because nobody's building coal-fired power stations any more. In fact, I think something like $3 million went into a study to build a coal-fired power station in Collinsville, but they didn't even finish the study, let alone the coal-fired power station. No-one's going to build a coal-fired power station anymore.

The opposition want to dangle out there a change to our energy policy to allow nuclear energy. Who's going to do that? The Australian people aren't going to let you spend $600 billion doing it. I don't think there's any private enterprise lining up to do it. Doesn't this sound sensible? Renewable energy firmed by gas and batteries. Doesn't that actually sound sensible to those in the opposition? Somehow there is this ideological obsession that you can't have this approach; you need the most expensive approach of coal and nuclear. If you believe in coal and nuclear, therefore you don't believe in climate change, somehow. The Prime Minister talked about that. Those are exactly his words from the last election. That's when I thought that he was really nailing it, with the way he summed it up. Our energy future is renewable energy firmed by gas and batteries, yet the opposition has withdrawn from the field.

I rise in support of these bills because the best indication of the values of a government is how it spends its money. I urge you to support it.

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