House debates

Monday, 22 February 2016

Grievance Debate

Tasmania

8:27 pm

Photo of Andrew NikolicAndrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

It is timely in an election year and nearly 2½ years since the 2013 election to reflect on the progress in my home state of Tasmania. I was pleased to once again hear the Prime Minister refer to this in question time today. There is no doubt that, on any objective measure, Tasmania in 2016 is in a much stronger position that it was in 2013. Tasmania's economy is growing faster than at any stage during the last six years. Premier Will Hodgman and Treasurer Peter Gutwein report that our state's finances are under control and they forecast that at the state level Tasmania will be back in surplus in 2017 and in every following year of the forward estimates. Major national surveys provide an increasingly upbeat message about Tasmania's business confidence and we are rated in those surveys as the most confident place in Australia to invest. The most recent Sensis business index rated Tasmanian small- and medium-sized enterprises as the most confident in the country.

Compare the situation I have just described with the situation reflected in the Governor-General's speech to open the 44th Parliament. It was with mixed feelings that I heard her speak about Tasmania. We were the only state singled out by Her Excellency for special and urgent attention. I recall a feeling of sadness that, after 16 years of Labor and Labor-Green government in Hobart and six years of Labor and Labor-Green government in Canberra, we were in such a predicament that urgent action was needed.

At the time of that speech just over two years ago Tasmania lagged the nation on almost every objective indicator that measures growth in our federation. Our unemployment rate was the highest, our participation rate was the lowest and 11,000 full-time jobs had been lost in Tasmania since 2010—coincidently, the year that the Bartlett Labor government and the Greens began their political alliance. We had the lowest proportion of private sector employment compared to public sector employment. We had the longest elective surgery waiting times and the highest proportion of people without superannuation accounts. Recall this quote from an editorial in The Examiner on 16 February 2012:

A predicted underlying surplus has been revised as a big deficit … economic growth is expected to decline … the Government will fail to meet savings targets … unemployment will continue to be relatively high … on top of this gloomy set of numbers, the forestry peace process has collapsed … Ms Giddings and her Greens cabinet colleague Nick McKim are at war … cabinet solidarity has been so bastardised as to be unrecognisable.

It was a very sad situation indeed, culminating in an unemployment rate above eight per cent, the worst in the nation. It got so bad that, on the front page of The Examiner of Friday, 12 July 2013, just before the 2013 election, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that he was leading 'a rescue mission, on the back of the state's worst unemployment figure for a decade'.

So it was no surprise that Tasmanians resoundingly voted for change on 7 September 2013. I am pleased to see my wife, Christine, who helped me in that very successful campaign, in the chamber this evening. Indeed, after that election the Labor Party was reduced to only one House of Representatives seat, having held all five in Tasmania only three years prior. As King John said, we cannot paint the lily. Economically and on social measures, Tasmania was in terrible shape. The Greens party were off with the fairies at this time, telling us that niche industries were the answer: woodcraft, movie-making, electric cars—even a blueberry-led economic recovery was proposed by one Greens MHA. The Labor-Greens government had strangled industries like forestry, with approximately half the state locked up. Yet Australia imports $2 billion in forestry products every year—or $4 billion if paper products are included—often from countries where environmental policies are nowhere near as good as they are in Australia. And still the Greens clamour for even more 'preservation'. Their definition of preservation, of course, means no use at all. There is a world of difference, as we know, between preservation and conservation, the latter allowing natural resources to be used in a sustainable way. As Bill Gammage has written, unmanaged forests are dirty forests. They are also dangerous forests, with residue build-up only making the fire hazard much worse—as Tasmania has found out, to its regret, over the last four months. Gammage points out that the Aboriginals regenerated the land through fire. The Greens' dogmatic policies to lock up forests vastly increase the fire hazard and, ironically, the potential damage to flora and fauna. The Greens' unwillingness to use biomass for productive purposes only adds to their culpability.

That is why I am pleased to report that the coalition's economic growth plan for Tasmania, announced by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott on 15 August 2013, has made a real difference. As promised, we established a Tasmanian Major Projects Approval Agency in Launceston as a one-stop shop. We provided incentives for employers to take on the long-term unemployed and set up a Joint Commonwealth and Tasmanian Economic Council. We concluded Productivity Commission and ACCC reviews into Tasmania's shipping costs, the competitiveness of our freight industry structure and improving the equity of the Tasmanian freight and passenger vehicle equalisation schemes. Two hundred and three million dollars was subsequently committed to the Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme. That which the Fraser government established, the coalition has so substantially enhanced. Sixty million dollars was allocated to irrigation schemes, enhancing $30 million of state government investment and $30 million of private sector investment.

The economic strides forward we have made in Tasmania have been driven by the real economy, the private sector. I am proud to say that the level of private investment in the last two years has increased by more than 10 per cent. In the 12 months to September 2015, Tasmania had the third fastest growing state economy in the country, behind only New South Wales and Victoria. There has also been strong growth in jobs. When I went to the 2013 election, the unemployment rate in Tasmania was 8.6 per cent; today, it is 6.6 per cent, substantially lower, with around 10,000 new jobs created. Importantly, we are no longer at the bottom of the national unemployment benchmarks, with our jobless rate now lower than South Australia and Queensland and about the same as Western Australia and Victoria. Dwelling investment was up 12 per cent in the September 2015 quarter. Completed construction work had its highest quarter on record, up 32 per cent in the year to September 2015. Tourist visitation is growing off the charts, and our retail spending is at record levels. Encouragingly, the value of exports has also increased by 3.4 per cent in the 12 months to September 2015, and there is more to come from that trifecta of free trade agreements with South Korea, Japan and China, negotiated by our outstanding former trade minister Andrew Robb.

Indeed, a Deloitte Access Economics Business outlook report last October has given this report on the Tasmanian economy:

The economic pain of the past decade is … dissipating.

Relative to other states, the Business outlook says:

Tasmania is still a bright spot in Australia's investment outlook.

The results I have described are the result of hard work, discipline and policy coherence between Liberal-led governments in Hobart and Canberra. As always, there is more to do, but the trend is moving in the right direction.

On the to-do list are a residual range of priorities, including doing something about the collapse in Australia's coastal shipping following the disastrous coastal shipping laws of the Labor-Greens government in 2012. Two more ships have recently withdrawn from plying the coastal shipping routes after commercial decisions by the two operators, Alcoa and CSL, having determined that it is no longer viable to operate the vessels in coastal trade. Over the first two years of Labor's coastal shipping legislation, the coastal shipping fleet halved from 30 to 15 vessels, demurrage rates tripled and freight costs doubled compared to regional rates. The number of vessels with a transitional general licence dropped by more than half, from 16 to seven. With the most recent decision by CSL, that number will, sadly, soon drop to six. There has been an almost 70 per cent decline in the carrying capacity of the major Australian coastal trading fleet, and the Australian shipping industry is simply not competitive and is costing Australian jobs. That is why I will do everything I can to ensure that coastal shipping legislation is brought back to the parliament this year. There is also more to be done to secure a brighter future for our forestry industry by developing value-added uses for our timber resources.

The contrast between Tasmania in 2013 and Tasmania now should give rise to even greater confidence and investment growth and more local jobs, and that is why I will devote every effort, as the member for Bass, to strengthening those laudable objectives.