Check against delivery
Paul – thank you for your introduction.
And can I commend you, Dan, and the entire Business Sydney team for what you do.
Yes, you advocate on behalf of businesses across Sydney.
But you’re also helping to mobilise businesses across the nation at this critical time for our nation.
Ladies and gentlemen:
Whether you’re here as business leaders, business owners, or business managers, thank you for your time today, but thank you, more importantly, for what you do for our country, and for speaking up loudly when we need your voices more than ever.
To my colleagues here today, especially my incredible Deputy Jane Hume, I’m truly blessed to have a team of such skill and substance.
And Jaimee – I’m looking forward to sitting down with you and the other panellists after my remarks.
But can I take the opportunity to acknowledge your fine work on News24 – especially shining a light on economic and business issues.
I’ve lived and breathed economics all my life.
Economists have a certain way of talking.
They talk about things like domestic capacity pressures, the flight of capital, stagflation, wage-price spirals, and aggregate demand.
That esoteric language of economics does it a disservice.
Because it detracts from what economics is all about:
Economics is about people.
Get the economics right and things go well for people.
Get the economics wrong and things go badly for people.
And right now, in Australia, because the economics is going very badly, things are going terribly for Australians.
Consider the human impact behind each of the following:
In Australia, 46 businesses are going bust every single day.
In August, property developer Bathla Group collapsed – with 2,000 homes under construction and 14,000 more in the pipeline.
In September, iconic brands, Cue and Veronika Maine, folded.
In October, the Bell Bay Aluminium smelter had to be bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of $200 million.
And just last week, David Jones went into administration.
A retail stalwart older than Australia itself.
An enterprise that survived the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Global Financial Crisis, and the pandemic.
A business that lived through 30 Prime Ministers couldn’t survive the current Prime Minister.
And as a result, the livelihoods of some 6,000 Australian workers are now threatened.
Last week, one of Australia’s greatest tech success stories, Canva – valued at $50 billion – was forced to undertake major layoffs and restructuring.
That’s affected more than 1,200 people – or 22 per cent of its workforce.
Ladies and gentlemen:
Under Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers, Australia is on a road to economic ruin.
The Australian entrepreneurial spirit – Australian enterprise – is being crushed under the weight of expanding government, stifling regulation, and rising taxes.
In just three years, federal spending has grown from around its historical average to the highest level in 40 years outside the pandemic.
As government gobbles up more of the economy’s scarce resources, the private sector starves.
Alongside surging inflation has come a rising tax burden, as bracket creep has driven more of taxpayers’ incomes into higher tax brackets.
During his time in office, Anthony Abanese has been the highest-taxing Prime Minister in Australian history.
His unrestrained spending has generated larger deficits year-after-year.
Desperate for revenue, the government now has the ATO turning the screws on struggling small businesses.
That’s why the government still refuses to absorb the ongoing cost of credit card fees on tax payments to the ATO – while expecting small businesses to absorb them.
Meanwhile, the Government has cooked up an $80 billion tax hike on capital gains, negative gearing, and trusts – punishing the enterprise we need to get us out of this hole.
The Prime Minister’s war on small business is taking its toll.
And because the Prime Minister can’t tell the truth, and his Treasurer can’t manage money, small businesses are being hit from every direction with higher taxes, higher interest rates, higher power bills, and higher insurance costs.
Hardworking small business owners have been left wondering: why bother?
With so many shutting up shop, with so many contemplating moving offshore, where is our future growth going to come from?
This is the economic reality of four-and-a-half years under Labor.
And the story of the last four-and-a-half years is simple:
The more Labor spends, the more Australians pay.
I’ve been visiting businesses and listening to business owners across the country.
For so many, the recent tax changes were the last straw.
During the Albanese government’s first term, businesses kept stoically quiet even as conditions gradually deteriorated.
It took this year’s budget for many to speak up and express their frustration with Anthony Albanese.
In the Prime Minister’s outdated socialist worldview, workers and employers are in a perpetual state of conflict.
His zero-sum mentality holds that, for workers to win, business owners must lose.
Once you understand who Anthony Albanese is, his tax changes make a lot more sense.
It’s clear the Prime Minister doesn’t understand the importance of having an aspirational economy.
Where people take risk and put everything on the line to get ahead.
But there can be no enterprise without investment.
And there is no investment without confidence.
Confidence not just in yourself, but in our nation.
Confidence that, in investing your time, money and effort, you will get something back in return.
Because he has no experience in business, Anthony Albanese doesn’t grasp that where there is no confidence, there is no investment, and no enterprise.
There is an unchanging story of economic progress throughout history:
More investment means more enterprise.
And more enterprise means higher productivity, higher real wages, and higher living standards.
No government that understands and respects what it means to run a business would ever have done what the Albanese government did on budget night.
The Liberal and National Parties would never have done that.
Because business is in our bones.
We understand it.
We have lived it.
We believe in it.
Matt Canavan and I – along with our whole team – resolved to oppose the government’s changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing.
And to axe every toxic tax should we win the election.
From day one, enterprise was drummed into me.
Growing up on a family farm, I learned that sometimes you have to forgo something in the short term to reap greater rewards down the track.
My parents saw small business as one the noblest of things you could do – a service to your community and country.
Enterprise is the great national enabler.
That’s why consulting suited me because it’s about enabling enterprise.
Early on in my career I focused on saving struggling businesses and industries – such as the steelworks at Port Kembla.
But I didn’t just want to stop businesses and industries from failing.
I wanted to help them grow.
That’s why I was so energised when I started working in the dairy industry in New Zealand.
You could see the market in Asia, driven by growth and a shift to dairy.
You could see the potential.
At that point, there were essentially two big cooperatives and a couple of small cooperatives left.
They were owned by the farmers who supplied them.
Their processing costs and farming costs were already the lowest in the world.
My job was to look at how they should organise for the future so they could capitalise on the growth opportunities that this new market offered.
That’s how the proposal to establish Fonterra emerged.
We would abolish the export monopoly, absorb the dairy board into the manufacturing cooperatives, and form a single cooperative that would compete on the international market and compete for milk.
New entrants could come in and compete against Fonterra.
It was a combination of restructuring the industry and then opening it up to competition.
I travelled from farm to farm and community hall to community hall across the country, explaining to farmers why reform was necessary, and how it would deliver lasting benefits to the industry.
It was a massive restructure, and it was a phenomenal success.
Suddenly, New Zealand had a player with global scale.
These farmers were great entrepreneurs.
Their instinct was to grow.
I’d later take that same approach to Australia’s growth engine in the Pilbara – the iron ore industry.
That’s a story for another day.
But what did I see in New Zealand?
I saw how structural reform unleashes growth.
I saw how competition elevates performance.
I saw how hard work and enterprise deliver prosperity.
And I saw how enterprising small businesspeople can succeed – if government gets out of their way.
And that is what Australia needs now, more than ever.
If the Liberals and Nationals form government at the next election, we are going to unleash enterprise in this country like you have never seen before.
We will tear down the barriers to aspiration and enterprise.
We will restore reward for effort in this country.
And I know from my lifetime of experience in businesses – small, medium and large – that when we unleash enterprise, we can grow like never before.
Productivity and real wages can grow like never before.
Wealth, prosperity, and the living standards of all Australians can grow like never before.
That is our potential as the greatest nation on Earth.
We just need to be unleashed.
There are three things killing aspiration and enterprise in Australia today:
Expanding government.
Stifling regulation.
And rising taxes.
And these are the three things we will set about fixing from day one.
First, on government.
A few weeks ago, I announced $31 billion of budget savings over four years.
This includes:
Abolishing Labor’s ideological climate bureaucracy.
Scrapping Labor’s ineffectual housing bureaucracy.
Terminating Labor’s pie-in-the-sky corporate welfare.
Stopping Labor’s welfare and the NDIS for non-Australians.
And crushing the tobacco black market to see revenue returned.
All of these savings have been fully costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office.
We can and we will reduce spending significantly while protecting the essential services Australians demand.
And there will be more savings to be announced.
Our approach to finding savings is grounded in discipline and responsibility.
We will cap spending growth to less than economic growth.
And I was pleased to see the Business Council of Australia call for the government to adopt something similar.
We will restore a cap on tax receipts as a share of the economy.
That’s one of the first things Jim Chalmers scrapped on taking office.
We will target a return to surplus.
Because the perpetual deficits this government is planning will impose an unconscionable burden on future generations
And as a commitment to this strategy, we will establish a Future Generations Fund.
We will save 80 per cent of future commodity windfalls to pay down debt or invest in productive infrastructure.
This government’s squandering of a record $400 billion windfall will never happen again.
Second, on regulation.
We will be cutting red and green tape like never before.
We’ve already committed to slash the National Construction Code.
From a shocking 2,000 pages, down to fewer than 100.
And that will cut the cost of building a new home by up to $70,000.
Labor’s tangle of green tape is imposing a carbon tax on our economy, weighing on business and driving up the cost of everything.
So we will scrap the safeguard mechanism, the vehicle emissions standard, and Scope-3 climate reporting.
Indeed, we will abolish carbon taxes wherever we find them.
That’s part of our plan to scrap Net Zero and to prioritise cheap and abundant energy to bring down electricity bills.
As is often stated, energy is the economy.
When we bring down the cost of energy, we bring down the cost of everything.
And we will also overhaul Labor’s burdensome EPBC Act – including by fast-tracking national strategic priority projects such as Browse and the Taroom Trough.
Of course, it’s not just regulation that’s a problem – but the regulators themselves.
That’s why we’ll rewrite the Statements of Expectations for all the major regulators requiring growth in living standards to be prioritised in all of their regulatory activities.
And we won’t stop there.
It’s typical for Oppositions to undertake a formal savings process, where Shadow Ministers are tasked to go line by line through their portfolios to identify budget savings.
We will extend that same approach to regulation.
Jane Hume – my superb Deputy and the Shadow Minister for Deregulation – will lead a Red Tape Razor Gang across the whole of government.
Each of my Shadow Ministers will identify red tape within their portfolio that we can slash.
And that approach will continue in government.
Consider this:
The cost for businesses to comply with federal regulation is estimated to have increased from $65 billion in 2013 to about $160 billion today.
That’s a 146 per cent increase.
So, in just over a decade, the cost of complying with federal regulation has more than doubled.
The Liberal and National parties will undertake an ambitious program of regulatory reform.
We’ll aim to reduce the federal regulatory burden by 25 per cent over our first term of government.
That equates to a $40 billion a year saving for businesses.
Over the past decade, our economy has been constrained by more and more federal government chains.
Our deregulation agenda is about taking the bolt cutters to these federal government chains.
A freer economy is an economy that can run faster, that’s more competitive, that’s more productive.
And nowhere will the benefits of this new freedom be felt more than in small businesses.
Under a government I lead, businesspeople will spend less time doing paperwork and applying for permits, and more time running and growing their business.
Third, on rising taxes.
We will deliver long-overdue, generational tax reform.
In my budget reply, I committed to three big tax cuts.
The first is to axe Labor’s toxic taxes on capital gains, negative gearing and trusts.
The second is to more than double the instant asset write-off to $50,000.
And the third is to give Australians a tax cut every year, by getting rid of bracket creep.
We will stop government’s bracket creep steal.
Based on budget analysis undertaken for us by the Parliamentary Budget Office, this package would cut taxes by more than $220 billion over eight years.
That’s more than $10,000 per taxpayer.
By 2036-37, taxes would be around $54 billion a year lower under our plan than under Labor.
That equates to $2,600 per taxpayer per year.
This package would hold the share of tax in the economy to below 23.9 per cent all the way out beyond the end of the medium term in 2036-37.
While Labor would breach it at least five years sooner, from 2031-32.
This was the tax cap the Coalition imposed in government.
We imposed it because we believe that if a government wants to tax you more, then it should have to ask your permission.
What’s so extraordinary about those figures – $220 billion, or $10,000 per taxpayer – is that it represents the additional taxes Anthony Albanese has said he will take from you over the eight years to 2036-37.
That’s what we’ll stop from happening.
Rather than jack up taxes to fill the hole Labor’s spending spree has created, we’ll stop the spending spree.
This is our enterprise-led plan for growth.
And we’ll have a lot more to say between now and the next election about how we’ll reignite growth in our economy.
The more Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers spend, the more Australians pay.
And here’s the fundamental economic choice at the next election:
More spending and more taxes under Labor.
Or less government spending and lower taxes under a Liberal and National government.
We’re going to eliminate government waste.
We’re going to slash red and green tape.
We’re going to abolish Labor’s toxic taxes.
We’re going to deliver a bigger tax cut every year to hardworking Australians.
We’re going to scrap Net Zero to bring down power bills.
We’re going to deliver the biggest cut to migration in Australia’s history, to guarantee more homes for Australians, and take pressure off roads, schools, and hospitals, while delivering the skilled immigration businesses need.
We’re going to tear down the barriers to enterprise, investment and growth.
We’re going to restore aspiration and reward for effort.
Because when government spends less, it leaves more in the hands of the people and businesses who earn it, invest it, and create jobs.
That’s how we get productivity growing again, lift real wages, and restore Australia’s standard of living.
It’s time to bring an end to a government content with managing decline.
It’s time for a new government that will fix the economy and protect our way of life.
Thank you.
