Friday, 5 September 2025

E&OE
Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here. It is wonderful to see your white bright beaming faces on a Friday morning. Thank you, Innes, for having me and inviting me. In addition, thank you particularly to Jeff Wilson, who I am not related to, for filling in because we had to swap around in terms of the priorities of the conference. I hear his presentation was spectacular on labour markets and the need for a realisation that things are not going in your favour in terms of labour market supply and skills. And yes, of course, policy is not exactly helping you on that front either, but it also highlights the points I've made already.

In terms of being the Shadow Minister for Small Business, Industrial Relations and Employment, it fits, of course, as part of a group of four of the economics team being led by the Coalition, and it includes of course Shadow Treasurer, Ted O'Brien, Shadow Minister of Finance, James Paterson, and Shadow Minister for Housing and De-regulation, Senator Andrew Bragg. And there's the four of us who work together very closely because we understand that we need to have a clear, coordinated and cohesive policy vision to take to the next election so that Australians face a clear choice.

I won't remark on where we were at the last election, needless to say that I don't believe that Australians felt that sense of clarity. And we need that sense of clarity around reducing red tape, around creating streamlining and simplification in our economic policy offering, because there needs to be a cleaning and a clear choice. Because at this point, and I don't want to indulge in needless partisan rhetoric, but there is a reality that this government's only approach is to make things more complex, certainly in the industrial relations space at the moment. It's serving no-one, it's not enhancing or benefiting, I think workers or employers, and as a consequence it's making it harder for particularly small businesses to get up to go on and employ people and to do similar things like comply with the law.

If you look at an environment where the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations can't figure out how to pay people properly, what help is a small business going to need to be able to do the same basic things. So the scale of the task is significant. Simplification, harmony, and streamlining is an obvious place to start.

Just for the basis that we do that, people will be able to get on and do what they need to do to employ more Australians and be able address the productivity challenges and the economic growth challenge. Because when I look at the challenges that our country faces... It seems pretty obvious to me that we don't know where our next stage of economic growth is coming from. And that is not a point to be tweaked.

I know that there are a lot of people who talk about the power potential of things like renewable energy, but we also need to be realistic about its limitations and what we're actually trying to replace, rather than it being a pathway for growth. Is that it's not going to necessarily be the pathway to drive increasing the economic pie. And you want to see what the consequences of what happens to a society when they deal with a period in their time where they're managing the problems of a limit in their economic growth, while they still have increase in their population and falling standards of living and that's basically where we are at right now.

Over time, it slowly grows a social fabric and then you have much bigger problems. We need to get back into the growth mindset. I know there's books that have been written overseas like Abundance, which apparently is basically socialist learning liberalism, which I welcome, because I always welcome people going on a path or a journey to discovering the power of liberalism. But we need to back into a growth mindset as a country, because that's going to be the basis that we're going to address our problems of wealth inequality to improve people's standards of living, and to go on and build the economic powerhouses of the future of our country. And that's very important, particularly in empowering small business.

Small business, the usual trope is, they're the engine room of the economy, but really they're the employers of the economy. There are millions of small businesses all around this nation who want to grow and be better and our job is to put them on the floor of public policy so that they can not just grow but become the future strength of our nation. And at the moment they're an afterthought in terms of public policy from the government, and we're bringing them back in the center of our policy thinking. One of the benefits of not being a industrial relations warrior, as put, is that I come with fresh thinking. And fresh thinking also means that I'm sponge. A sponge for new ideas and suggestions and people have already been coming to me with lots of them and we welcome the opportunity for anybody who has ideas about what it is we need to do. I have my own very strong views on these things of course as well, but we genuinely welcome people putting forward ideas about what we can do to strengthen the future of these conversations because we see them as central and critical to the success of our country. And more importantly, that from that, that we can drive the economic growth that can then lead to the employment of the future on our nation. Because whether it's the deregulation agenda, the productivity agenda, or of course due to other issues like housing supply, in the end there's a story about how we build the success of our country.

But we also need to break down some of the entrenched interests. I see your major sponsor, who's here from Australia Super? There you go. Hey, nice to see you. One of my big beefs is the collaboration that sits between Labor governments, superannuation funds and unions. And there is, particularly at a state level, a cartel that is far too often operating directly between each of them and it's at the expense of the Australian people and particularly future taxpayers. We need good value in the operations of public projects to make sure that we're getting the best value for money.

That's certainly not happening in my state, in the great state of Victoria, or what was once the great State of Victoria. And we need to be doing everything we can to address the cartel that operates so that we are not pushing needless costs onto the rest of the Australian community. And the cartel, the top rating, which is leading to a situation where inflating costs are being pushed through the community to the benefit of a few, is not a desirable outcome. And too many decisions are being made right now which is benefiting the favourable interests and entrenched interests of union bosses and it's not even necessarily delivering better outcomes for workers. You only need to look at the report in The Daily Telegraph this week, we've had a 25% increase in the pay for CFMEU bosses while we've seen a 5% decline in the pay for CEO construction industry workers over the past five years.

This is not a desirable outcome for our country. We can't have a cartel operating where a few are benefitting at the expense of the many. That is the real gap. Well, it's one of many real gaps that now exist in our economy. We need to make sure that this nation is working for every Australian. But in the end we're Liberals, we believe in a nation where people show effort. And if we want to have a successful country it comes from the spirit of ingenuity, effort and applying ourselves. Someone asked me last night about my attitude towards unions and I made the point that I actually am quite pro-worker. Pro-worker and pro-small business because I'm favourable to anybody who shows effort. What I'm not favourable to is idleness.

We all have given one great gift in life, which of course is life itself, and the opportunity to do amazing things with our effort. So whether you're working, or whether you're a small business, or of course working for a larger entity, if you're applying effort, you should be rewarded for that effort, and that's a wonderful thing. And the more we can spirit people into that sense of effort and away from idleness, the better. So policy focus should be engineered towards encouraging that effort. And so we need to be backing Australians to back themselves. Salaries are very important, and of course part of the options that Australians have.

But more important with policy, I want to be seeing pathways, and it's going to be important for the future of employment dynamics. Is how we encourage Australians to have options and choices. Because the future of workplace relations is increasingly going to be a mix of salaries, side hustles and shared equity schemes, as part of the change. I think that's where we're going to get to particularly around the role of artificial intelligence. I think where we're where going to see this is, making an observation and no one knows where we ultimately go with AI, but I think where it's going to lead to is a burden in small business and people competing.

The flip side of that is it's going to lead to more and more small businesses and equity schemes, and we need to be supercharged on that potential and that opportunity for people. So the more we can do that to incentivise that so people have choices, the better. But it's not gonna be because people choose small business or a salary, it's because they're going to be choosing multiple options. Or they're going to be choosing them on a graduation throughout different stages of their life. So that's the basis in which I'm approaching these portfolios as part of an economic team that is very focused on building out an alternative economic story for our country. We're of course very excited about the opportunity and while I know that some people probably look at the political dynamics at the moment, they're going, oh well they're a fair way from government.

I remind people only in January of this year the potential that the government was going to fall, none of their problems have gone away, in fact, they've only amplified over the coming years. A government that has been elected on a primary vote of nearly 30 percent is very fragile indeed and I don't say this to overstate our position or underestimate theirs. Numerically they're strong in the House of Representatives, but the reality is they're very fragile and they know that as well, I might add, despite the hubris of the Prime Minister in question time yesterday.

So be mindful that change could come and it could come quite rapidly and considering the changes that exist in our country outside our borders that is coming at us whether we want it to or not, we are in a dynamic time as a country. The forces beyond us are far greater than anything that this room controls. Our question and choice as a nation is how we respond. The question for us is whether we're going to meet that moment and whether we are going to have the policy to respond to it to steer our country through difficult times.

The economic policy that we're going to focus on is how we'll meet that challenge because the stakes, as I started with, are high. Because what we're seeking to build is not just how do we get through a three year cycle. The stakes of what we are talking about is how are we going to build the future of our country. So thank you very much.

ENDS