Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

We can stick to the facts and win the election.

The next thing is the government budget looks like it will be in surplus this year, for the first time—if not last year. We'll find out in a couple of weeks. Net debt has peaked, and we're starting to pay it down. We have also retained our AAA credit rating, which under the current circumstances, with the trade war that's going on, is, I think, a fantastic effort. Our employment is still growing at twice the average OECD rate, and that's quite a good effort.

With regard to the tax cuts, we have actually brought in the low-income offset rebate and a middle-income offset rebate, and they're kicking in this year. We're pleased to have legislated for significant tax cuts in the future. If we can maintain a strong budget position—and we'll see what happens as to future tax cuts—I'm optimistic that we can bring some more in there. We also have a record $100 billion infrastructure pipeline. As I have just mentioned, we're spending a lot of money here in my home state of Queensland, and I know that we're also spending a lot of money on the New South Wales Pacific Highway. I drove down there last week. This time next year we should have a fully dual-carriage highway all the way between Brisbane and Sydney. That's our second-busiest road, behind the Hume Highway. Most of that's been built in the last six years, since the coalition has come to power, and that's a fantastic effort for the people of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, who use those roads all the time in a very heavily populated area. That's just one of the many areas. We've also improved a lot of roads around the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, and we're now looking forward to improving the roads above Gympie on the way to Rockhampton. That's something that I know both Senator Scarr and I will be backing—to push further duplication of the highway up to Rockhampton and the Wide Bay area, which is one of Australia's fastest-growing areas.

I think the other thing that's worth noting in regard to small business is that we have a $525 million skills package which is going to deliver up to 80,000 new apprenticeships over five years in priority areas of skills shortages. Isn't it fantastic that we're getting back to our skills? We're going to bring back our tradies, which is something I'm very passionate about. We've also increased the instant asset write-off to $30,000, which is another great help for our small-business people. We've also reduced payment times down to 20 days; that's another good one.

I want to touch on the business tax cuts that we brought into parliament in the last term, reducing taxes to 25c in the dollar for small businesses with turnovers up to $50 million. Hopefully that should get our Australian-owned businesses on the record growing. I think we can see that with the fact that we've now got back into a trade surplus as well as a current account surplus and also a budget surplus. If we get that, that will be a record which we'll be very proud of; we'll have a triple surplus. So I'm looking forward to the next 12 months.

Unlike Labor over here, I won't talk down the economy. I won't talk down the Australian people, because I believe in their aspirations and their dreams, and I think that we can see out there in the results in the last election that the Australian people would agree with that. They turned their backs on the big-spending Labor Party and the constant vilification of our hardworking miners and farmers. These are the guys that actually create the wealth in the country. These people over here want to bite the very hand that feeds them, and that's not the way this country was built. This country was built on the back of hard work, not sitting around in ivory towers in the cities and saying, 'We're going to solve the world fixing up climate change or whatever.' No, there's no substitute for hard work, Senator Sterle—no substitute for hard work.