Senator SINODINOS (New South Wales) (10:57): A typically erudite and feisty contribution from Senator Stoker, standing up for the people of Queensland! It's good to see. In this address-in-reply speech, I will address some of the items in the Governor-General's speech. What I found interesting was that it was a very wide-ranging speech. I was very impressed with the breadth of it. It was a reminder, and perhaps a rebuke, to those people who believe that the coalition is back in government with a limited agenda. In fact, the Governor-General laid out a very broad agenda. I particularly took to heart what he said towards the end: And with those words it is my duty and my very great pleasure to declare the 46th Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia open. To me, that was a reminder that this parliament and the democracy that underpins it is the pinnacle of the Australian achievement. It's here where the great national issues are fought out, debated, discussed and decided. Now, with the election over, our job as a government is to get on with serving the needs of the Australian people in the terms in which they gave us that remit at the election. We are back to pass laws that will improve the condition of our fellow Australians. That is the bottom line of what this government must be about—what any government must be about. The bedrock of that is the economy, and I quote from the Governor-General's speech where he said: My government believes a strong economy is the foundation of the compact between Australians and their government. The foundation of the compact with the Australian people—the mutual obligation that exists—is that we expect our fellow Australians to work hard, play hard and live hard. But, in return, we expect our government to provide the conditions in which Australians can thrive and prosper. This is the mutual obligation at the heart of the compact between government and the Australian people. To me, there is nothing more important in that regard than what we do about our rate of productivity growth. Our productivity is not about working harder or working longer. It's about working smarter. It's about investing smarter. It's about all the ways in which we provide for new products and services, new ways of doing things and new processes. Going forward, it's important for us to have doubling the rate of productivity growth as our challenge so that we can maintain the growth in living standards we've become used to over the last few decades. Over the last few decades, income growth has been strong in this country. But for that income growth to continue, we need to double our rate of productivity growth, and that is the challenge that the Treasurer laid out in a recent speech where he talked about the importance of productivity. My colleagues in the Treasury and elsewhere, people like Ken Henry and others, often talk about the three Ps: productivity, population and participation. I believe strongly in population growth. I believe in a strong, well-managed immigration program as the bedrock of Australian development. That creates challenges, but we can meet those challenges. I think strong population growth is important for economic reasons, social reasons, cultural reasons and for our capacity to project our strength in the world. I strongly believe that participation is important. The greatest area of participation today where we can continue to make inroads is female participation in the workforce. While that has been rising, there are still challenges around that, and these challenges need to be addressed, whether it's in the way in which our tax and transfer system operates or the impact of effective marginal tax rates on people. It is often secondary income earners and women taking time out of the workforce to have a family who bear the burden of doing that and also contributing to government finances. It's important for us to promote measures that promote participation in the workforce. It also means, within the workforce, making the best use of all the talents available. People sometimes say, 'Why should we worry about diversity and inclusion?' Not only is diversity and inclusion a right in its own regard in how we treat our fellow human beings, it's also important in making the most efficient use of all the people we have in this country. I noticed the other day, for example, Gareth Evans talking about a bamboo ceiling when it comes to Asian Australians. We want to make sure that we make the best use of all our talents at all levels in Australia and that we break the ceilings, whether they are glass ceilings or bamboo ceilings. As the distinguished American economist Paul Krugman once noted, the bedrock is productivity growth. In the end, it's about productivity growth. So it's important, as I said before, to focus on how we can double the rate of productivity growth to maintain that growth in living standards as we go forward. This is a long-term agenda. It's not going to happen overnight. The fruits of productivity growth do not appear overnight. The results can take years to come through, so there's no time to waste. We always have to be ready to do things. As my former employer John Howard used to say: 'With reform, the finishing line is ever receding. Just when you think, "I've done enough; I can rest on my laurels," there's always more to do if you're going to continue to raise incomes and living standards.' This is about not only incomes for people in work but also providing us with a capacity to support the living standards of people who are retired or of people who, for reasons of disability or whatever, cannot support themselves. Productivity growth is for everybody. Everybody has a stake in productivity growth, and for us in Australia there is plenty to do. We have many firms in Australia which are not as good as the top firm in their own sector when it comes to levels of productivity or productivity growth. Also, when we look at our best firms versus the best in the world, there's a gap in the productivity frontier that we can potentially meet. There are sectors where we are world leading when it comes to productivity and efficiency—there's no doubt about it. Agriculture and areas of mining come to mind. The important thing is that there's a gap there that we can exploit which gives us a capacity to raise our incomes going forward. As a government, we have major commitments to jobs growth, public debt, smaller family businesses and exporters. For example, it's our aim to create 1.25 million new jobs over the next five years, including jobs for 250,000 young Australians. These jobs will build on the additional 1.4 million jobs created over the past 5½ years. We aim to pay down debt in a consistent and responsible way so that we can eliminate our net debt by 2030. Eliminating our net debt will make us stronger. It'll give us fuel in the tank. We had that fuel in the tank when we had the global financial crisis in 2008. Because we'd paid down our debt as a nation and we actually had net financial assets, we were better able to spend money to cushion the impact of the global financial crisis on this economy. You need that cushion. You need that budget cushion, those shock absorbers, so that when you're dealing with global slowdowns you have a capacity to shield the population. It's always the most vulnerable who are most impacted by economic slowdowns. Our job is to shield them, in particular, from the impact of those sorts of external shocks. Our aims also include to have another 250,000 small and family businesses open their doors during the next five years and to see 10,000 more Australian companies exporting to the world by 2022, with these exporters benefitting from existing and new trade deals which, by the end of this term, will cover around 90 per cent of our trade. So, by the end of this term, we will have trade deals that cover 90 per cent of our trade. Just think about that: we have trade deals with China, with the Republic of Korea, with Japan. We have free-trade deals with the US. We've negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which covers 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific. We're negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which covers many of those countries and China. We have these free-trade agreements that are flowing through, creating new opportunities for us or protecting our existing markets. It's very important for us to continue with those agreements. I commend Senator Birmingham for the job he's doing as minister for international trade and investment. We've already delivered on a major commitment that we made at the time of the election: the tax cuts. The tax cuts have been enacted. They are starting to flow through. As the Treasurer said, they haven't fully flowed through yet. We haven't seen the full impact of those tax cuts. A lot of that will come through in the September quarter and later. Those tax cuts are important. They're important in putting fuel in the tank where the economy is concerned. Some people are concerned that not all these tax cuts will immediately go into consumption, into spending on goods and services, directly into the economy. But, when people pay down their debt, when they pay down their mortgages, when they pay that to the bank and the bank gets that money back, that money then potentially circulates as new funding, new debt, in the economy—new mortgages in the economy, new lending in the economy. So even when people are paying down it potentially then still sees its way back in the economy. It's important. Along with the tax cuts, we've seen interest rates coming off, and the dollar has come off. We've got a major infrastructure investment program that's ramping up, something like $100 billion over the next few years. It's very important in terms of constructing new roads, new rail, new ports—everything that goes into creating the infrastructure for productive opportunity and activity. If you invest in the future through infrastructure, the payoffs are higher incomes and living standards in the future. It helps us with productivity growth. It's very important that that continue. This government has also made a major commitment to cutting red tape. There's a lot of red tape everywhere. The reality is in this building, even when we're cutting back red tape, we're adding to it in all sorts of other ways, as many people will attest in the business sector and taxpayers more generally. So, for us, red tape reform is not just about the laws on the statute books. It's not just about the paperwork. It's also about regulations which impede our competitive forces in the economy—our mobility, our flexibility—things that stop us from being able to get things done and get them done quickly. There's been a lot of debate around environmental approvals, and there have certainly been efforts by this government from when we first came into power to streamline those approvals to create, if you like, more capacity to combine Commonwealth and state approvals so that people don't feel like they're just going through parallel processes, so they feel there is one seamless process. We need to continue that activity. We need to continue to fund strongly the ACCC and its work in promoting competition in the economy. I also commend the work that the Treasury portfolio are doing on data rights, on open banking so that you can shift your banking more easily between providers, and providers can use your data to come up with new products to meet your needs. And now we're seeing the rise of the fintechs, which are financial organisations that are using high technology, new technology to create new products and services in the financial space. This is a big game-changer in financial services; it's undermining the existing competitive structures. It's creating new structures, and that's a good thing, because, ultimately, that will create a more competitive landscape, which will be of benefit to bank consumers. We're also seeing the rise of what's called regtech, which is the use of technology to promote better regulation, more efficient regulation, and that's got to be a good thing. We need good regulation. When you do regulation properly—for example, when we regulate our agricultural goods and services properly, that's a big elephant stamp that they can use when they're marketing internationally, to say, 'These are Australian products, regulated to high standards, so you can have confidence if you consume these products because of Australia's reputation of being clean and green.' My point being that there is this technology disruption underway. We have to face into it. We have to embrace it. We have to adapt to change. If you don't adapt to change, it will walk all over you, it will roll over you. We don't want that. We want to adapt to change and empower people to deal with change. As part of that we embrace the development of new industries, whether it's in the energy space, where we're seeing the development of renewables, we're seeing a parliamentary inquiry into what will happen about nuclear energy. It's a reminder that Australia has the capacity to be the Saudi Arabia of alternative energy. We're seeing new industry development in space. We now have the Space Agency. I was the minister when we did the preparatory work for that. It was announced in September 2017 that we would have a space agency. That's now underway. That's going to facilitate our capacity to develop industry in that sector. And there's a lot of commercialisation of Australian innovation and inventions to come. We need to keep promoting collaboration between industry, researchers and academia. That's one of the areas in which Australia still has more to do. We're great at inventing things. We're great inventors; we punch above our weight. We're great at doing blue-sky research, but we need to increase the linkages between that research and commercial outcomes—particularly outcomes that we develop and exploit here in Australia, because our aim should be to create homegrown firms that have their headquarters in Australia and make their decisions according to Australia's needs, and not be branch offices of overseas companies. It's very important for us to do that. We have world-beaters like Atlassian showing us how to do that. It's important for us to continue the government initiatives that are facilitating start-ups through venture capital and our procurement strategies, so we can increase the rate of business growth. The rate of business growth has been falling off since the global financial crisis. We need to take measures to keep creating more and more businesses and companies in Australia. That's why the government has made a commitment to numerical targets in that regard. Complementing all of this is what we do around industrial relations. Here, the Prime Minister has made it clear that what we do in industrial relations will have to meet a number of tests. It will have to be mutually beneficial for employers and employees, it must not undermine existing conditions and it must provide broader benefits to the economy. It's very important to take people with us. It can't be reform for its own sake; it's got to be reform that addresses real issues. So business and others who want change in this area have to argue the public interest case, whether it's on unfair dismissal laws, greenfield agreements, the content of enterprise agreements or other changes that they need or that they see as important in promoting a more effective, resilient industrial relations system. Importantly, we have to have a system that can adapt to new ways of working, new collaborative workplaces with strong digital frameworks—that's the workplace of the future. How does our industrial relations system facilitate all of that? How does our industrial relations system facilitate the gig economy without throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to worker protection? Linked with all of this, of course, is skills acquisition and lifelong learning, because, as I said before, disruption is a constant; we have to adapt. That means that people may find during their working lives that they have various occupations. They need to be able to adapt; they need to be able to undertake the training or retraining needed for those new occupations. We have artificial intelligence, which is impacting on the composition of work. We have Industry 4.0, which is about how we wire up workplaces using technology. All of these things are creating challenges for our workforce going forward, so we need a flexible and responsive system that can respond quickly to changing circumstances and to many changes of job over a lifetime, which means the use of modular learning—so you don't have to go back to school every time you need to undertake skills training to do something different. There's also got to be a clear differentiation between general skills you may pick up in school, university or TAFE and specific skills you pick up in a workplace or by doing those specific modular courses I mentioned. I commend Australian companies like Faethm, which is a fast-growing company that helps companies and governments to assess the impact of emerging technologies on the jobs market, to reskill employees for the future, and to guide the implementation of appropriate investment strategies and policies to maximise the benefits of digital transformation. What Faethm do is essentially take an existing set of jobs and work out how those jobs will look in the future—what will be left, what will be new—and, therefore, what the workforce needs of the future are. These are tools that a lot of companies are picking up. They're used in parts of government. I encourage the government to pick up and use Faethm for workforce planning to get an economy-wide picture of how the workforce will change. Then we can talk to people about what the challenges are and how we can give them the tools through our skill packages and other things. We're investing major new resources into the skills space, setting up a national skills commission and a national careers institute. The budget contained a $585 million commitment to improve skills and training. (Time expired)