Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In fact, it is getting worse, Senator Conroy. They are getting less equal. The income of the total population in Finland, for instance, went up by 1.7 per cent and the top decile went up twice as quickly as the bottom. We were told that places like Sweden are wonderful, but there the top went up six times as quickly. So that argument did not really hold water. The ones that really struck me—this goes back to the Tasmanian example—the countries that saw the bottom going up more quickly than the top, so therefore the country was becoming less unequal, were Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

We see countries whose economies are not doing well becoming more equal. That is at the heart of the debate we are having with our Labor and Greens colleagues. It is not about bringing everyone down. It is not about slowing economic growth so that everyone becomes a little closer together. We should acknowledge, if you look at the last couple of decades of Australia, that we have done well not just in overall economic growth but across the income levels. Across income levels, people have gotten better off. That is something we should be celebrating. We should not be taking the model that is suggested to us in the majority report, that we take the Tasmanian example as somehow being better than the WA example. I completely reject that. That is socialism masquerading as fairness. It is really simply about the redistribution of wealth. We want to see everyone lifted. We want to see everyone given the opportunity to thrive. If you do that, if you create those economic conditions, inevitably some people will do a bit better than others. We should be doing all we can to make sure that there are not blockages to those opportunities so that people can have the opportunity to get a good education, whatever their background, and people can have the opportunity—if they want to—to start a business without the government getting in their way constantly and holding them back. We want to empower Australians.

Two people who are given exactly the same opportunities will not always have exactly the same outcomes. That is the way life is. We do not actually resile from that. Some people will choose to put more hours into their business or into their work and they may well get more prosperity. Some people have more luck. In the end, as long as we are having the fundamental conditions that allow people to thrive, we believe that is the way to go and not the model that is suggested to us by those opposite, which is that we bring everyone down and bring everyone closer together. We want to lift everyone up, give everyone the opportunity to thrive and see the whole economy—whether it is the top, the middle or the bottom—all doing well and all having the opportunity to thrive. I think that is a fundamental difference between us and the other side. That is why we did not agree with the majority report. That is why I would commend the dissenting report to the Senate.