Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) productivity growth is at its slowest rate in 60 years,

(ii) as a result, people born in the 1990s are the first in multiple decades to miss out on generational progress in incomes, enduring comparatively worse standards of living, and

(iii) a boost in productivity growth to the historic average by 2035 would put $14,000 per year in current Australian workers' pockets;

(b) believes that the productivity-enhancing initiatives proposed by both the Government and the Opposition to address productivity stagnation are insufficient to meet the scale of the problem; and

(c) calls for more effective productivity growth measures suitable for today's economy, to ensure that today's Australians get more in their pockets, and that our children experience better standards of living than us.

I read an interesting article in the ABC the other day called '23 big ideas to boost Australia's productivity'. It had different experts in different fields pitching what they think a big, transformative change that would increase productivity would be. The advocacy group Indigenous Business Australia suggested that we should invest more in Indigenous businesses. The CEO of mental health charity Beyond Blue suggested we should invest more in mental health. A professor at the Queensland University of Technology School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences suggested we focus on air quality. These people all suggested that the way to boost productivity is to boost their particular cause. This has been the problem plaguing the productivity debate for a really, really long time. Everybody's got a different idea of what it is and what it means, and that results in different ideas about what to do about it. Some people use that confusion to push their own interests, and we end up getting nowhere.

Part of the reason productivity debates get muddled is that the word 'productivity' itself is so muddy. What does productivity feel like? What does it look like? Nobody can picture it; nobody can experience it. It's just kind of lingering around in the public policy debate. Productivity, I think, is a means to an end. When we talk about productivity, we talk a lot about the means, and that's fine. But, if we want people to care about this, pay attention to this, get excited about this—and we should want that—then we need better language around it. When we say 'productivity', we should really be saying 'quality of life'.

I'm a parent, and I think what I want for my kids is the same as what any parent in Australia wants for theirs. We want for them a better life, an easier life. We want our kids to thrive in an environment where everything they want to do is available to them and everything they want to experience is there. We want them to be good people, responsible people, kind people. We don't want them to know what hunger or pain feels like. And we want them to experience that feeling of abundance—that they can have it all. To me, that's what quality of life looks like. The way we get there is through productivity. The future generation should be left a valuable and strong economy, so that they can actually afford things.

People of my age have already experienced that, courtesy of the work put in by the generations of our parents and their parents. It's an intergenerational gift. We don't always recognise and appreciate it, but, believe me, when you take that flight to Bali with a ticket that cost you the equivalent of 12 hours of work and sleep in a hotel that would have cost you about the same—in the end, you're looking at a week's worth of work to pay for a week-long beachside holiday—you notice it. Let's not talk about whether you took the kids with you too, though! That is the kind of luxury that people a hundred years ago would have killed for. Productivity makes that possible, and now we aren't growing in efficiency the way we had been growing for decades before.

The reason we're stuck in the same productivity swamp we've been in for years is simple: our political system is built on a seesaw of competition between unions and business. When the Labor Party gets in, unions see an opportunity to reverse all the pro-business policies that the Liberal Party introduced and make it easier for unions and employees to capture a bigger part of the pie. But, because unions don't represent the same share of the workforce as they used to, they long ago realised that the fastest and easiest way for them to make economy-wide changes in their favour is to make economy-wide laws. To do that, they need lawmakers—that's the Labor Party.

Then the Liberal Party accuses Labor of being a mouthpiece for the union movement, and the Liberals get back in. Business groups see this as an opportunity to reverse all the pro-union policies that Labor introduced and make it easier for businesses to capture a bigger slice of the pie. But the business lobby are not as influential as they once were, because the public doesn't really hold them in high regard. They have money when the going's good, but the going's not always good, and businesses, at the end of the day, don't vote, so they have a structural disadvantage in this fight. The best they can do to even the ledger is give money. And, when they do, the Labor Party accuses the Liberals of being in bed with their big donors, business interests, and all about the big end of town, and the popularity of the Liberals suffers—until they're kicked out, and the unions see an opportunity.

This is the dynamic of the modern two-party system. It's been the same dynamic for the past 50 years at least. We as a country can't really meaningfully improve productivity when two major parties are focused on undoing what each other last did. We can't meaningfully move the needle if each of the major parties is financially dependent on an increasingly sidelined interest group focused on pushing its agenda. Business says we should streamline workplace laws, cut red tape and reduce taxes. The unions say we should avoid any of those things and instead pay workers 20 per cent more per hour. Does this not have a familiar ring to it? This is what people were talking about when John Howard was prime minister. We're debating solutions that are old enough to vote!

I think a really simple way of measuring what productivity would look like is to look at how desperate businesses in Hobart, Launceston and Devonport are for staff. They are reliant on staff who are on temporary visas in order to meet demand, and they are constantly losing them, having to find more staff, having to retrain them, then losing them all over again. The biggest thing we can do to help these businesses that are suffering from a staff shortage is to deliver efficiency benefits that make it possible to say that the thing that takes three staff today will require only two staff tomorrow. That would reduce their pressure hugely. It would mean more businesses are open. We have businesses in Launceston that are permanently closed, with signs on their windows saying they could not find staff. It's like a gravestone: 'Here lies the dream of that small-business owner who took a risk'—starting a business, trying to be their own boss but they couldn't outrun Australia's slow productivity growth.

Labor is today patting itself on the back for cutting a series of nuisance tariffs. And great; do it. But the effect of this is on productivity is going to be a fraction of a fraction of a per cent. Would we even notice the effect on our productivity growth rates? We need big-picture changes, things that will make a large, permanent difference in the cost of doing business. Here are a few things you won't hear from the major parties, though. A labour market needs complete restructuring, not minor tweaks. We could replace the current maze of seven different leave types with a single universal leave allowance of 25 days annually, weighted down from current total entitlements and based on actual usage patterns. Workers could use these days for any purpose—illness, holidays, family emergencies or personal time—without requiring a different approval process or documentation. Businesses would deal with one simple system instead of tracking multiple leave categories with different rules and obligations.

While we're at it, we should scrap long service leave entirely. It's essentially paying people to stay put rather than find their most productive role. The average long service leave liability represents around two per cent of total wages annually. But we don't want people losing out financially. Instead, mandate that this amount be paid as an immediate productivity bonus, distributed quarterly based on measurable performance outcomes. This would reward actual contribution rather than tenure and would remove barriers to job mobility that trap workers in suboptimal roles and prevent businesses from accessing the best available talent.

Currently employers must advertise locally for at least four weeks, demonstrate that they couldn't find suitable local candidates, and maintain detailed records proving the genuine need for overseas workers. This applies across the board, from fruit pickers to software engineers. The whole system is built on the flawed assumption that businesses would rather deal with visa complexities than hire locals if locals are available. In reality, businesses always prefer local hires when possible, because they're cheaper and simpler. Locals stick around for longer. The labour market testing requirement just adds months of delay and thousands in compliance costs for no productivity benefit.

Instead of making businesses prove that there's a skills shortage in their specific location for their specific role, make it the federal government's job to maintain a real-time national skills shortage list based on actual labour market data: unemployment rates by occupation, wage growth trends, job vacancy duration et cetera. If you can demonstrate competency in a shortage skill area through practical assessment like trade tests, coding challenges or portfolio reviews, you get immediate work rights—no employer sponsorship, no labour market testing, no bureaucratic gatekeeping.

The complexity of our current approvals system is itself a massive productivity drag. The time it takes to get a mine from approvals to actually digging is almost a decade. The problem is that bureaucrats responsible for ticking these things off do not want to be the one that approves an environmental disaster. There is no reward for approving something that doesn't cause a scandal, but there is huge punishment for being the one that ticks off the approval that does. So the incentives of the bureaucracy responsible for the approvals are all stacked in slowing things down, triple-checking everything, double handling and making sure responsibilities never rest with one person. Aligning the incentives of the bureaucracy with the interests of the project proponent is the theoretical ideal, but it opens up all sorts of corruption risks. You don't want bureaucrats getting cash payments in exchange for approving things that really should not be approved.

I think a productivity-enhancing solution would be to introduce skin in the game without giving cash to bureaucracy. The federal government could introduce a statutory project approval guarantee in law that is a predictable, enforceable assurance to applicants that you will get a final answer by a certain date. If that date is passed without a final decision, the federal government would pay interest on projects over $100 million at the market rate cost of capital for the project. With safeguards like a stop-the-clock mechanism, where the clock isn't ticking while the government is waiting for information from the applicant, you could see bureaucrats facing pressure from ministers as to why a decision has not been made, and they would see their own budgets being hit if they drag their feet. It would mean more project applications, and it would see their decisions being made sooner. We're reducing the cost of getting big things done simply by changing incentives around.

I am putting forward these ideas not because I think they are the best the country has to offer; I am putting them forward because they're ideas that haven't been put forward before. That, if nothing else, makes them worth considering. Anything we can do to get ourselves out of this stalemate of stale ideas is worth doing. Why? Because I want to make sure that we're richer tomorrow than we are today. I want leaders who want the same. This is my way of saying it's not that hard. Let's get the conversation going.

Richard Dowling (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Tyrrell for putting this subject on the table because productivity is at the centre of everything this government is trying to achieve in driving living standards. In the first term, it was very much a fight against inflation to protect from the cost of living. Now the focus firmly has to be on resolving that long-term productivity challenge. It's an issue I know both of us care about for our home state in Tasmania particularly. I think what's been proven with this government is we have been very open to all ideas, and certainly the ideas you put forward deserve consideration.

The focus we took with the roundtable was to bring together unions, businesses, researchers and the community sector because it is a whole-of-economy effort. Senator Tyrrell, I know you touched on unions and business, and there was some swing back and forth, but actually productivity is much more than that. There is a weird debate in Australia sometimes as though it's something the government pumps out, as though the government is there to deliver productivity. If you look at some of the recent remarks from former RBA economist Luci Ellis, she said, first of all, that these challenges are a global issue across most of the OECD, regardless of which governments have been in power, which flavour, what the power of the union movement is or what the power of the business lobby is. Secondly, she said it's a very unusual debate in Australia, where there's an obsession on the government being the determinant of productivity.

Yes, government can play a role, obviously, in setting the rules and regulations, but there is so much more across the economy that government doesn't control. When we think about the factors that drive productivity, like capital deepening, innovation, entrepreneurship and managerial capacity, a lot of that is beyond the realm of government. Do we really want government in there doing some of those things? The work force and driving managerial capacity and entrepreneurship, that's something we want to be encouraging, but we don't want to say that's government's job entirely; we actually want to have that innovation culture, that entrepreneurial culture, and encourage more of the risk-taking as well. With the workforce, driving managerial capacity and entrepreneurship are things we want to encourage, but we don't want to say that's government's job entirely; we actually want to have that innovation culture—that entrepreneurial culture—and encourage more of the risk-taking as well. Yes, government has a role, but I don't think we ever want to say productivity is the domain of government alone.

Again, thanks for raising it and putting it on the agenda. I think, as I said, higher living standards, higher wages, secure jobs and an economy that works for everyone, not just the few, is the benefit of productivity. That's why this Prime Minister has made it so that high living standards are the holy grail, and the key to that is productivity. That is the centre of our economic agenda. Without ignoring inflation—the two do go hand in hand—productivity growth underpins sustainable wage rises, cost-of-living relief and national prosperity. I don't think any government—and you could do the word count—has talked more about productivity than this one. We do have to now follow through on that.

The Treasurer has made it very clear that the work of the round table will now inform the subsequent three budgets and our long-term agenda, and I think the feedback out of those round tables was pretty positive on the whole from all sides. It wasn't business complaining or unions complaining or anyone else. Everyone's ideas were heard, and we're not in this rule-in-rule-out game that the other side has tried to engage in. If we want to get somewhere and achieve lasting results that are not particularly partisan, this silly rule-in-rule-out game is not a productive way to go about it. I won't stand here and say we should rule out your ideas, because they should be considered; let's have a look at them and do the research. That's entirely appropriate. It's not: 'What a terrible idea. Will you immediately say you won't do that?' That's not the approach we're taking.

You did highlight three critical points in your motion. That the productivity growth is at its lowest rate in 60 years is undeniable. As a result, Australians born in the 1990s are the first in living memory to risk generational improvement in income and living standards, and that's something I'm equally passionate about. I spoke a lot about it in my first speech earlier this week—making sure we renew that intergenerational handshake and that we actually do create a world where conditions are better for the next generation. On all three counts, you're right to draw attention to the challenge, and we don't shy away from it. Yes, productivity is at its lowest rate. Australians risk seeing the first generation to experience a decline in living standards if we don't act. And, yes, lifting productivity to its historic average would transform household incomes.

Where I differ is on the fact you say our response has been insufficient. The job is not over, but certainly we are doing a mountain of work. I know you highlighted things like nuance tariffs. No one measure will do everything. I know people are saying we need that huge, big-picture thing, like how Keating floated the dollar—what's the next big picture? But actually, if you study the work of the Productivity Commission, they said the key is shifting the dial across thousands of little things. It's not the one, big-picture thing; it's thousands of little things, like changing the culture within the bureaucracy, our culture towards regulatory decision-making and having that abundance agenda. Dare I mention that book again! But that book talked a lot about stopping emphasising process over outcome. That's a real cultural shift we could make instead of just asking if we have ticked all the right boxes. Are we actually getting the outcome?

It's evident that we are trying to shift that culture. We've tried to really push forward on the housing agenda. We're putting a pause on the construction code and saying, 'Let's not keep adding more and more layers,' because there's an incremental effect. Similarly, it's easy to add in new regulation and go, 'Well, that regulation won't hurt productivity,' but incrementally, across thousands of them, it has a huge impact. Too often, we don't look at that total impact of all the new regulations. That is again something that we're trying to change the culture on.

If I just think about things from the round table process—and I won't list all the thousands of things that could be done—there's further abolition of nuisance tariffs. Tick. There's red tape reduction in the National Construction Code. Tick! There's accelerated environmental consideration under the EPBC laws. Tick! There's a new regulatory reform bill in 2025, including a tell-us-once service delivery. That's a really big one, and I know we had former New South Wales minister Victor Dominello, who's the digital master in this space. What he learnt in New South Wales was that no citizen should have to give their information to a government agency more than once. They should be able to share that, with the appropriate privacy safeguards, and not have to fill out a thousand forms, giving the same information for years and years. Putting in some of those 'tell us once' reforms will have a big impact. The national AI capability plan is fundamental to embracing one of the most transformative technologies in human history, and there's the invest-to-front-door pilot to fast track transformational investment.

Beyond these immediate steps, there are very clear reform directions: establishing a single national market, simplifying trade and tariff reform, making better regulation and faster approvals in priority areas, building more homes more quickly, making AI a national priority, attracting and deploying investment capital, building a skilled adaptive workforce and a better tax system and modernising government services. So I don't think anyone could accuse this government of tinkering at the edges. This is a serious reform agenda to lift productivity, prosperity and wages. I think it's something that we should all be engaged in, and again that's why I welcome your contribution, Senator Tyrrell.

Leading up to this, I was fortunate to actually host the Tasmanian economic roundtable. We partnered with the University of Tasmania to deliver that. I think it was the first of its kind, feeding in voices from all parts of the state and all sectors of the community. We had industry, union and academia there. All the Labor members of parliament were there but not all the members of parliament. We focused on three priorities for Tasmania, which were helping productivity and dynamism without sacrificing fairness, building skills and education and recognising care as economic infrastructure—noting that we have a much higher preponderance of what are sometimes pejoratively called 'non-market sectors' but they are basically the care economy.

Sectors in the care economy are statistically lower productivity sectors. You can't deny that, because they take a lot of human effort. It's very hard to make the traditional savings you would by putting in a whole bunch of new capital equipment or modernising a factory because you can't do that necessarily in an aged-care home or a nursing facility. But we can look at ways to actually help those workers by giving them state-of-the-art technology to work with and digital assistance to take a lot of the menial tasks away from them so they can actually spend more time doing what they do best—looking after people and not filling out forms and paperwork.

I think the stakes are clear. In our home state, we're only a $40 billion economy. That's about $70,000 per person compared with $96,000 per person nationally. If we could improve productivity just in Tasmania by one per cent, that's $400,000 million annually to our economy. That's the equivalent of a whole new industry, so the stakes are huge. It's really worth investing in.

I will conclude by thanking Senator Tyrrell for raising the topic, and we will absolutely continue to engage in the topic on this side of the House. Let's not rule things in or rule things out. Let's put everything on the table and take it forward and consider the approach. Productivity is not an overnight challenge; it's decades in the making. People in 20 years, 30 years or 40 years will pay attention to the decisions we make today, and they'll either benefit or not. Thanks for raising the motion.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, through you, Madam Acting Deputy President, to Senator Tyrrell for her motion on productivity. It's a previously uncontroversial aspect of economic theory which last week was beaten and hacked to death in a politically inspired talkfest that was designed to get everyone sick of talking about productivity and to deceitfully raise the issue of increasing taxes. I can understand why this government wants to avoid discussing productivity. It's because productivity is the inevitable victim of the measures this government is pursuing. Net zero is the primary culprit and rampant immigration is also a main culprit, along with excess regulation and giving large union bosses more power to control businesses, workers and workplaces.

At the recent tax summit, Treasurer Chalmers attempted to frame productivity as taxation. Taxation is the enemy of productivity. When you raise taxes, you reduce productivity. He had the intent, it seems, of using taxation as a blunt instrument for social engineering, such as using a new 'bedroom tax' to throw elderly Australians out of their homes into a single room in a retirement home so they can fill that family home with foreign families arriving to take advantage of this beautiful country. Our elderly who are choosing to stay in their family homes for as long as possible are not the enemy of productivity. Australian parents keeping a spare bedroom for when the children come to visit are not the enemy productivity. Australians using their spare bedrooms for work from home or to run a small business are definitely not the enemy of productivity. Indeed, the reverse is true, unless the Treasurer is suggesting working from home reduces productivity.

Before Labor start whingeing, Senator Gallagher and Senator Wong were given opportunities in question time to rule out the new bedroom tax, and they did not. Why else would the government have allowed others to float an idea that's monstrous, if not that they knew it would be unpopular? They left others like the SBS to find out how unpopular it turned out to be. The answer is simple: this government is desperate for new revenue. In fact, this government is desperate to pretend they know what they're doing.

Every Australian's share of the national pie shrinks every time a new arrival comes here and takes a slice of Australia for themselves. The only way this is not an accurate comment is if every new arrival contributes more to the economy than they take out for themselves and if they create the wealth to pay for the $11 billion a year they send back to family overseas. On Monday's Notice Paper is a motion from One Nation to refer immigration to a Standing Committee on Economics inquiry. It's time to talk about the effect of immigration on productivity, inflation, housing and wages. It's time to get to the truth and to let those cards fall where they may. One Nation are prepared to hear the truth. Are you?

One Nation believes high immigration, record mass immigration, excessive mass immigration, is affecting productivity. Workers need housing. They need transport. They need education and health care to be the best they can be, to work at their highest level of efficiency, to work healthy and work happy and work safely. Immigration is forcing up housing, clogging up transport, reducing education, reducing education outcomes because entire classes don't have English as a first language, and hospitals are overwhelmed. These are facts.

These are the same Australians who feel the talk of productivity is about workers being made to work harder. It's not about workers being made to work harder. It's the opposite. The Liberal Party might use that definition; One Nation does not. Australians in the workforce are working hard enough. Responsibility for productivity is not on the workers' shoulders. I agree with Senator Dowling.

One Nation understands that one way of raising productivity is through infrastructure, and we're advancing projects to build Australia's future. As an example of infrastructure, Sydney University estimates the failed NBN will ultimately cost $50 billion, yet the Productivity Commission only values the NBN at $20 billion. The productivity loss here is more than $30 billion of taxpayers' money. It's the lost productivity the NBN is causing. It's not just the loss of value of the NBN; it's the loss of productivity across the economy due to a faulty NBN. The government has shut down its 3G network, reducing communication; with that, productivity in the bush has decreased. Although, in the finest tradition of free enterprise, Elon Musk's Starlink has come to the rescue of our rural community—no government needed and a better solution. If he could work on GPS that uses Starlink so that tourists are not getting lost in the long black spots between country towns, that would be welcome.

When it comes to productivity, net zero is the worst offender. Look at the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Greens. There's a direct correlation between increases in electricity and energy prices and business bankruptcies. Even the ABC is reporting that business failures have hit their highest levels since COVID, with the hospitality and construction sectors seeing the most insolvencies and the main causes being rising rent, electricity prices and increases to the minimum wage.

Electricity prices are costing productivity. The Tomago Aluminium smelter in the Hunter employs 1,000 people directly and supports 5,000 jobs in the local community. It uses 10 per cent of New South Wales's power supply, which was not a problem when it was being supplied with cheap, reliable and affordable baseload power from the Lidell coal power station down the road in the Hunter. Now, though, with Lidell closed and the last two coal power stations keeping the lights on in New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria, the cost of power is about to cost one-quarter of Australia's aluminium capacity. It's a threat to Tomago's viability. Incitec Pivot closed its Gippsland facility in Queensland in 2022 and its Geelong plant last year, costing 200 Australians their jobs directly and close to a thousand jobs lost across the local community. Now fertiliser is more expensive and less reliable in supply. Productivity is lost across the country. This scenario is being repeated across the economy.

Data from IBIS provides the following projections: factory and industrial building construction, down 18.6 per cent; nut, bolt, screw and rivet manufacturing, down 14.5 per cent— that might sound boring or trivial, until we realise every piece of construction in our country uses one or all of these right across the economy—petroleum refining and petroleum fuel manufacturing, down 13.1 per cent; road and bridge construction, down 12.6 per cent; nickel ore mining, down 10.6 per cent; commercial building construction, down 9.7 per cent; coalmining, down 9.8 per cent. Tens of thousands of jobs are gone. Tens of thousands more jobs in local communities are gone. Breadwinner jobs, union jobs—gone. Thanks, Prime Minister Albanese. How can businesses pay higher wages when their output is falling, their profitability is falling and they are continually battling red, green, blue and black tape? They can't. It's impossible.

In particular, coal is a key input in steelmaking and energy generation. I'll say it again: coal is a key input in steelmaking, and steel is in everything! It touches everything, transport included. And coal is a key input in energy generation. Australia is one of the world's lowest cost coal producers. This is a key industry that provides critical export earnings—significant royalties to pay for Labor's wasteful handouts to renewable energy and entire towns relying on coal.

Net zero energy costs are driving up electricity bills for everyday Australians right across the country, forcing small, medium and large businesses to close, decimating communities and reducing our productivity. These are facts happening in front of our eyes. Productivity increases come from investment. Whether investment is from government and business—investment in infrastructure, communications, technology and R&D—that's how everyday Australians get sustainable pay rises, from better investment. Everything this government invests in decreases productivity and sabotages sustainable pay rises for Australian workers.

Ironically, before Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, former Labor prime ministers and a former Labor treasurer, productivity was a dirty word in the Labor Party. The term 'productivity' was misunderstood, but Bob Hawke and Paul Keating fixed that. Before them, it was thought that increasing productivity needed workers to work harder or cut conditions or be exploited. That's the reverse of improving productivity. That's reducing productivity. Labor's Bob Hawke and Paul Keating changed all that, because they understood that higher productivity was the way to increase wages, to increase the standard of living, to reduce prices and the cost of living, to creating wealth for the nation and for all Australians, to reduce inflation, benefiting retirees and everyone on fixed incomes and offering consumers greater choice, more options and more leisure.

Why? How does this happen? Productivity is not about working harder. Raising productivity is about working smarter. At its core, productivity is about producing more with less input, or more output for the same input, increasing infrastructure, increasing technology and working more cooperatively, more easily. Higher productivity is the worker's best friend and saviour. Higher productivity is the family's friend. Higher productivity is the consumer's friend. Higher productivity is the employer's friend. Higher productivity is the business's friend. Higher productivity is the owner's friend.

As an underground coalface miner, I felt satisfied, happy and proud when we, as a crew at the coalface, produced more with less physical effort. As a coalmine manager, I felt satisfied, happy and proud when we, as a mine, produced more with lower costs, no safety incidents, higher bonuses to workers and lower turnover of people due to people being satisfied, happy and proud. Everyone wins from higher productivity, providing it's achieved properly. People working smarter, easier and safer to produce more and at higher quality comes from people working together with discipline and responsibility and from the sharing of ideas, open communication and real respect and trust. One Nation will build infrastructure; terminate net zero; get red, green, blue and black tape off the backs of businesses; and restore wealth and opportunity for all, especially hardworking Australians.

Question negatived.