Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week I convened a real productivity roundtable to discuss the real economic challenges facing this nation. The government's productivity roundtable had clearly failed to tackle the major issue. The major issue facing this country is our skyrocketing energy prices. Anyway, you don't need an economics degree to understand that when energy prices go up by a lot, it hurts your productivity, so it shouldn't be a surprise that in the past 20 years Australia's productivity growth has slowed, and in the last three years of this Labor government has fallen off a cliff. Yet the government's papers in preparation for its roundtable did not even mention the topic of energy—didn't mention it. The government now has no plans to lower our energy prices from some of the highest in the world. That was, principally, why I convened a roundtable of expert economists and business leaders here in Canberra, including Gary Banks, a former commissioner of the Productivity Commission. He made the very good point that traditionally this country has been able to offset our high wages by having lower energy costs. We've traditionally had very high wages and we're very lucky have been born here and experienced that, but the reason we can afford that is we have lower other input costs, like energy prices. Now that we don't have that, our high wages and our standard of living is all put at risk.

There were some real, tangible ideas put forward to turn that around: including removing our legislative ban on nuclear energy and our de facto ban on coal and gas, unlocking those energy supplies; removing all the ridiculous subsidies we have for too much of the unreliable energy that we have; and re-establishing an independent regulatory review body to make sure we cut back on red tape and on government spending too.