Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters) | Hansard source

It's great to get up and make a contribution on the election and the government's agenda on what is a very important debate. Certainly, I think that the 2019 federal election will go down as a critical election for many people. It was an unexpected election result but an election where I think it's very clear—and I think this was clear in the analysis both before the election and after—that the Australian people were faced with a very clear choice, and perhaps a clearer choice than they had been faced with in many, many years. It was a choice between the strong economic record of the Liberal and National parties in government, strong borders and strong communities, and a return to the deficit and despair offered by those opposite.

The Liberal-National government went to the election saying to the Australian people that if they had a go they would get a fair go. We support hard work, we support aspiration and we support a decent safety net for those who are struggling at various times in their lives to look after themselves, and we absolutely support people getting on and living their lives, making decisions for themselves and their families and being supported to do that in the best way they can. The government wants to say to those quiet Australians who supported us that we want to continue to deliver for them, that we are grateful and that we are humbled and honoured by the opportunity. I want to put on record again my thanks to people here in the ACT who have given me the opportunity and the great honour and privilege to be back in this place, and the government more broadly thanks those who, right around the country, made the decision to support the Liberal and National parties. We want to honour that by continuing to build on what we've been able to deliver in the last six years. We want to continue to go well beyond that. We want to create a further 1.25 million jobs over the next five years, building on the 1.4 million jobs created since we took government in 2013. Having got the budget back in the black, we want to continue our sound and sensible management of the nation's finances so that we can consistently and responsibly pay down Labor's debt.

This year's budget surplus, the first in 12 years, is a starting point for $45 billion in surpluses over the next four years. This is a significant step on the road to being free of net debt by around 2030. Because of our strong budgetary and economic management, we were able to promise much-needed tax relief to hardworking Australians. We're pleased to be delivering this tax relief for people right up and down the income scale—starting, most importantly, with low- and middle-income Australians. We are putting more money in their pockets so they can choose how they spend it: spending it on their families, on the essentials, on those little extras that improve people's lives or on contributing to their local communities, as so many Australians do through generous giving.

Whatever choices they want to make we want to support them, because we don't believe that the government knows best. Governments are very important, but we trust the Australian people to manage their money and, wherever we can, we want to return more of it to them. As I said, there was a really clear choice between that kind of strong budgetary management, strong economic management, strong borders and lower taxes versus what the Labor Party were offering. That would have destroyed our economy, whether it was through their raft of huge additional taxes hitting retirees, hitting superannuation, hitting home owners and renters or hitting income earners. This was a radical tax-and-spend agenda put forward by the Labor Party.

Of course there is much reading of the tea-leaves, soul-searching and all of those things, but the attack on aspiration, I think, was absolutely at the heart of what the Australian people were choosing to reject when it came to what the Labor Party were offering. I was interested in some of the analysis that said that, if you were a family with kids, if you were renting or if you didn't have a six-figure salary, you were more likely to swing towards the Liberal and National parties. I think that is critically important. Wee hear the rhetoric about the top end of town. Those people are not the top end of town; those people are hardworking Australians, often on pretty modest incomes—perhaps aspiring to have significantly higher incomes in years to come. They are saying to government: 'Well, get out of my way. Yes, we want you to deliver on the key services'—which this government is doing—'and we want strong economic management and budgetary management, so you can invest in health, education, defence, roads and other infrastructure—the NDIS, the PBS,' as we are doing. But these quiet Australians don't like being told what to do by government. They are good and decent people who don't like being told what to do and what to think. They're not going to cop the sort of sneering condescension from some people—people like Jane Caro, who said on election night that she was going to stick two rude fingers up at the truculent so-and-so who has voted to turn backwards. They're not going to cop it from people who say they're racist because they believe in controlling our borders. They're not going to cop it from people who say that they're bigots because they believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion. These are the quiet Australians who have made their voices heard very strongly at this election. And I think they're not going to cop it from greenies and others who fly into town and tell them that their industries should be killed in order to make green activists feel better about themselves, as we saw in Queensland.

I want to talk about one of the issues that I think was very critical in the election. It was critical in the election because the housing and property market is absolutely critical to all of us. It's not important just to the building industry, although there are hundreds of thousands of jobs—millions of jobs—in the property, building and construction industries. It's very important to those industries, but it's not important only to them. It's not important only to investors, although we know there are many Australians, and many low- and middle-income Australians, who invest in property as a way of providing for their families. We absolutely support them, but it's not important just to them. It's important to home owners, of course, as owner-occupiers. As we know, that is the largest asset that most of us will ever own, so an attack on property and on housing is an attack on Australians across the board.

And, finally, it's also important to renters. Analysis has shown that high-renting electorates swung more strongly to the Liberal and National parties than other electorates around Australia. I don't think there are any surprises there, and I think this is one of the things the Labor Party missed. As we were going around the country and talking to people about the consequences of Labor's housing tax, their proposed changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, we heard that renters actually would have been some of the hardest hit. Yes, you would have been hit if you were in the industry. Yes, you would have been hit if you were an owner-occupier. Yes, you would have been hit if you were an investor. But renters would have copped an absolute whacking. And it's important that people understand that this is a policy that the Labor Party still maintains. This is still their policy, the housing tax.

We can go through the dozens of analysts who said: 'Your house price will go down. Thousands of jobs will be lost in the industry, and it will hit economic activity as a result. And renters will be whacked.' During the election the Labor Party tried to claim—and they would still, no doubt, maintain this—that actually it wouldn't increase rents. But we saw some really detailed analysis from a large number of different groups, who all came to the same conclusion: if you take away what is effectively a rental subsidy, if you have a special or different tax treatment for investment in residential property to what you have for investment in shares and other areas, well, guess who's going to pay for it? It'll be those who are renting, those who are already doing it tough and those who, in many cases, are doing it tougher than the rest of the community. We heard this from the Property Council, the Housing Industry Association, academics at the University of New South Wales, the founder of Binvested, the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales, SQM Research and dozens of other organisations; we heard them all coming to this conclusion. And SQM Research, who I think were rated by TheAustralian Financial Review as the most accurate residential property forecaster for about three years running, so come with significant credentials in analysing this, talked about this.

So let's look at what Labor's policy, which they still hold, would do. It would push rents in Perth up $72 a week. It would push rents in Brisbane up $91 a week. It would push rents in Melbourne up $65 a week. It would push rents in Sydney up $50 a week. It would push rents in Adelaide up $56 a week. It would push rents in Canberra up $55 a week. It would push rents in Hobart up $44 a week. It would push rents in Darwin up $15 a week. Overall, on average it would push up rents in the capital cities by $67 a week. That is what Labor's policy would do, and I think that was absolutely critical to the election result.

We saw absolute hubris from the Labor Party on this, and on other issues, and I think that this was the other important message. We heard the stories about the Labor Party bullying people behind the scenes, saying, 'We're going to be in government soon.' We saw the pictures. I've got that lovely picture, the 'We're ready' picture with the then Leader of the Opposition, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and a number of other Labor figures—the then shadow Treasurer—all there, posing, ready the move into The Lodge and deliver their tax and spend policies. They were ready to come in and push everyone's rents up, lower people's house values, hit retirees and put more taxes on hardworking Australians, who are working hard to save for their retirements. That's what they were planning, and the hubris that we saw was extraordinary. I haven't seen anything like it in any election campaign that I've been involved with. We're all aware of the then shadow Treasurer's comment, Mr Bowen's comment where he said, 'If you don't like our policies, well, go ahead and don't vote for us.' That was him effectively saying to retired Australians, who might be hit by his retiree tax, 'Well, we don't need you.' That was the message: 'We're not going to govern for everyone; we're going to govern for the 50 per cent plus one who we anticipate will vote for us as a result of these policies.'

We also saw Andrew Leigh, who is fond of demonstrating how much smarter he is than everyone, even though he's so often shown to be not across policy detail and to get the details completely wrong. He knew exactly how much money the retiree tax would bring in for the Labor Party if they were to have come into government and implemented it. Five times in one interview he was asked how many Australians would be affected by his policy, but he wouldn't answer. He ended up laughing off the question, dismissing it and claiming somehow that it didn't matter, that, because he didn't have his iPad in front of him, it didn't matter that 900,000 Australians would have been affected by that tax grab from the Labor Party. Mr Leigh was very happy to dismiss those concerns, because he thought that they were going to sail into government. There is no doubt that the Australian people responded in part to that. They responded to the higher taxes, to the whack on their home ownership, the whack on renters, the whack on aspiration and the whack on investors. We saw that throughout the campaign and on the night of the election.

We've been getting on with the job. We have re-established the ABCC. We've signed free trade agreements. We've expanded the coverage of our trade agreements from 26 per cent of two-way trade to nearly 70 per cent. We've kickstarted a massive infrastructure program. These are all things we can be very proud of. We're cutting taxes and delivering the budget back into surplus, all while being able to invest in absolutely critical areas—health, defence, roads and infrastructure, disability, the PBS. All of that can be done because we're delivering a strong economy and a strong budget.

I started by thanking those Australians who have supported our agenda and saying to them that we want to build on that so that we can continue to deliver good policies and that we don't take for granted their support. I would like to thank some people who did some outstanding work in the last term to highlight some of these policy issues. I would like to acknowledge a number of people in the industry who spoke out against Labor's housing tax. I was involved in holding forums around the country where we put the facts on the table in relation to what it would have done. It's difficult when you're told that one side of politics is definitely going to be in government. Some people won't want to argue against that side's policies, lest they be punished should that side come in. These people showed great integrity and the courage to say, 'This is what we believe. This is the evidence we see. We're going to make that argument, whether it's good for us personally or not.' They are people like Dave Bailey and Mark Hewitt at AFG, who really put out the messages in relation to mortgage brokers and their impacts and the impact of the housing tax; people like Mark Haron, Michael Williams, Doron Peleg, Emma Dupont-Brown, Ben Kingsley, Jock Kreitals from the Real Institute of Australia, Marissa Schulze from Rise High Financial Solutions; and people like Louis Christopher from SQM, who really put out some outstanding research that blew the whistle on what some of these policies would have done and that showed the policies would have hit a cross-section of the community. They would have not just hit jobs in the construction industry, investors and owner-occupiers but also and most particularly hit people who were renting. I think people did start to hear that message.

Finally, all of us in the Senate and the House of Representatives know that it's a great, privileged position and that we can't do it without all of the people who support us in our offices and our party organisations. I'd like to pay tribute to some of the staff who assisted me during the 45th Parliament. I had some absolutely outstanding staff who worked extraordinary hours and who are very talented, very hardworking, very loyal and very bright. They bring so much, including strong values, to the way they deliver—not just for me but more particularly for the people of the ACT and the people of Australia—in the various roles that we have. I wanted to particularly pay tribute to Angela Inglis, Teaghan George, Cassandra Choake, Ben Dennehy, Veronica Hosking, Janet Parnwell, Elizabeth Storer, Matt Mitchell, Sarah Duffy, Andrew McIndoe, Zac Lombardo and Josh Goldsbrough, as well as some of our fantastic DLOs: Nicolle Sullivan, Samuel Burns, Daniel Craig, Morgan Ryan, and some of those who filled in here and there where needed.

I'd like to now also take a moment to pay tribute to a staff member of mine who has moved on, who was with me for a long, long time—a very loyal and faithful staffer who after six years has left my office. When I was first elected in 2013, Sam Mullins joined my office as an electoral officer, and over the years he has been an extraordinarily effective and capable adviser. As well as being a capable adviser, he and his lovely wife, Anna, are good friends with me and my wife, Ros, and our family. Sam has relocated to Sydney with his wife, who has taken up a role at Westmead Children's Hospital. I wanted to take the opportunity to wish them well for the future, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to specially pay tribute to Sam for his outstanding and loyal service and very much wish him all the best for the next stage of his journey.