Speech: Thank you to the community of Mitchell again for their endorsement to represent them in this parliament

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell—Manager of Opposition Business) (17:28): It's a privilege to rise today to follow my good friend the member for Berowra, my neighbour in Sydney, whom I congratulate on his re-election. I obviously welcome the fact that, after a very tough contest, he was returned by the people of Berowra to serve them. I also want to open in this parliament by thanking my community in the Hills district again for their endorsement of me as the local member and their support for me to continue, for the next three years, to represent them in this parliament.

It's been a great privilege for me to represent all of the communities of the electorate of Mitchell since 2007. However, we now have a very reduced electorate. This election saw a redistribution that led to the loss of the suburbs of Box Hill and Nelson and a lot of Rouse Hill, which were vibrant and very special parts of the Mitchell electorate. We saw them go to Greenway at this election, and obviously it was sad to see them go. I still miss them, in terms of the connected community that we have with Kellyville and the rest of the Hills district.

However, that is the theme of the times. In the Sydney equation, in the growth that is being put upon us by the New South Wales Labor state government, the lion's share of new housing is being asked to be met by the north-west of Sydney. In the initial proposal up to 30,000 new dwellings is proposed in already overloaded suburbs under the government's priority housing precincts. Through the community's action, through the Hills District's action, we put together a petition which has seen 20,000 people sign it, and it was submitted to the state parliament of New South Wales. That government already has relented and downscaled the amount of housing they are proposing in my community, in our federal electorate. This is a good and welcome move, but my priority as your local member for the term ahead will be to say to the state government: if you're going to increase the densities to that level in one community in the north-west of Sydney, you must provision infrastructure and you must provision the necessary services our community will want. At the moment there is no plan for an additional school, and to propose even 20,000 new residents with no additional public school isn't an acceptable position from a state government—especially a Labor state government, I must say.

Regarding the Rouse Hill Hospital, which the member for Greenway spoke about extensively in the campaign, there are more delays to the funding and the building of the Rouse Hill Hospital. It was commissioned by a Liberal government, the land was secured by a Liberal government, and the site was prepared and ready, with the funding put aside. That has still not commenced. We also had the ridiculous situation where the state government announced there would be no maternity facility at a brand-new public hospital in the biggest growth corridor in the biggest city in our country. I commend the member for Greenway for getting that reversed. Good on her. We all took the same view early on that this was ridiculous. I think she was president of the Labor Party in New South Wales at the time. I just ask her and the state Labor government now: how could you possibly, in 2025, propose a brand-new public hospital without maternity services in the biggest growth corridor in the biggest city in our country? With completely ridiculous issues like this, the community has to waste enormous amounts of time fighting for basic common sense of government policy.

Now we understand that maternity services are going to come, but the hospital hasn't started, even though we're now looking at the fifth or sixth or seventh year of well-established need for this hospital, and the land is provided for, the site is secured, and we're ready to go. This has got to get underway. This is a top priority. For Premier Minns to tell us we're going to have an additional 20,000 residents when we already need our public hospital built, this is really where the priority is: better infrastructure and services, and for the funds to be provided at the same time as the houses and the dwellings. It isn't acceptable for a state government to say to a community, 'Take these additional dwellings without those services.' So we've got a good fight on our hands. Our community's up for it. The 20,000 petitioners have already got a win, we have seen a downscaling of these zonings and we have seen some sensible adjustment.

I think Minister King in the previous government promised infrastructure funding, and she actually made some announcements with the member for Greenway, including a huge amount of money, half a billion dollars, for regional parks, one of which is in my electorate. We're going to hold the government to account for every single cent of that money—an enormous amount of money for three sites in Sydney, I must say—so that it is spent on the proper infrastructure provision within Sydney electorates. Some people will say they were good announcements, but we still can't get details or answers to basic questions. Where are the parks? What are they for? What regional precincts are they intending to create? They were election announcements committed to, but they have not been forgotten just because the Albanese government has won the election. They need to come forward with this money and provide for this critical infrastructure in parts of Sydney. So I will be holding them to account on that.

The signal that was sent to us—to the Liberal Party here in Canberra but also to me as a representative of my electorate—was that people wanted us to do better on the economy in particular. The economy continues to be the No. 1 issue in Sydney. The cost of living is through the roof, and that isn't just a mantra people use every day about the cost of living. I can attest to the House personal anecdotes from my street. A property sold this month for $2.3 million which would have been about $1 million 10 years ago. Prices in Sydney are through the roof. The average price in my electorate is heading to $1.5 million or $1.6 million for a basic dwelling. This is unsustainable price growth already, so I do question and caution the government about its five per cent deposit guarantee which they have been trumpeting. It is worth trying as a policy, but to apply it to properties up to $1.6 million—to have five per cent with no income limits on $1.6 million—does create a lot of questions.

One of those questions is: have they modelled the impact on prices in major cities of all these new buyers being given, in effect, the guarantees to access the market in a demand-driven way? We've already had 10 and 20 per cent price increases in recent times. Will this increase prices further? Some economists say it will. How will that help people if prices continue to rise in this unsustainable fashion? The government needs to be very careful about the unintended consequence of this policy: the impact of it at this point in time on pushing up prices, especially in metropolitan cities. It could be real.

There's no point hitching someone, on a five per cent deposit, to an unsustainable price if that price is going to continue to rise because of these demand-driven policies. There isn't the supply, even with the Premier's good intentions to fast-track homes and fast-track projects; they're still two to three years away in Sydney. I want to remind this House that the state of New South Wales built more houses at the end of World War II than we did in the last year, despite a population differential, with a substantially lower population. More houses were built in the year following the end of World War II in a single year in our state, the biggest state with the biggest economy, than were completed in the last year, despite, so many years later, demand and population being through the roof.

This is a huge problem. Prices are going to continue to increase. The cost of housing and now the cost of rents will increase, with unsustainable rent increases still coming across the City of Sydney. People are getting rent increases again—big ones. This is going to continue to be a drama. The government says: we've got a fund, and, with the earnings off the fund, we'll build a few houses. This is not going to solve the problem. It doesn't matter when the fund comes online; even small increases in the amount of social housing will not solve the basic economic problem in our major cities, where unsustainable price rises for housing and now rent are causing a cost-of-living crisis.

People are paying more for their mortgages, even with interest rate reductions, because prices are going through the roof. With their deposits lower, they'll still pay an enormous proportion of their disposable income into mortgages for longer. Rents are through the roof. People can't afford to rent. We have social challenges in front of us that are immediate and require much more urgent action from state and federal governments, in terms of unlocking cheaper and more sustainable housing for all kinds of people who are seeking housing in the market.

All constructors and builders will tell you that in Sydney today you could probably not build a house in New South Wales at the moment for less than something like $400,000 minimum. Why should it be the case that that is the minimum house cost before you even get to the price of the land? We need to provide cheaper housing solutions—and more of them, much faster—if we are to seriously tackle this issue.

I flag again—with the state government in particular, but also the federal government—that these housing policies are not going to be sufficient to reduce prices. Prices are going to continue to rise unsustainably. It's not going to put downward pressure on rents. Rents are going up, yet we don't see any policies cutting through to reduce the actual cost of construction, to accelerate the release of land and to see more and cheaper dwellings built in a faster way—and this is going to get even more urgent in coming years.

It's incumbent upon parties like the Liberal Party to have a good quality housing policy at the next election. It's something that we will absolutely be committed to working on, to make sure that we can cut through this cost dynamic and to make sure that we do put downward pressure on prices so that people can afford to rent and afford to live.

We've also seen cost-of-living pressures placed on every kind of business around the country. Having been elevated to shadow minister for industry and innovation, what shocked me the most about getting an update from every major business around the country in the industry space was that a lot of them are on their knees in terms of their profitability and their ability to compete internationally. Almost all substantial heavy-industry businesses across the country are asking for a handout or bailout from the government—and they have serious reasons to do so.

The government's response, of course, has been to have funds like the National Reconstruction Fund and the Future Made in Australia fund to hand out money to businesses. We still question the wisdom of this approach, because the government continues to increase the cost of doing business. Energy costs are through the roof, not just for consumers but for manufacturing and domestic industries. Wages are, by deliberate design, being pushed as high as possible, even though we've seen today that profitability in all major sectors is in many cases negative and in some cases very low. Profitability is falling and wages are going up unsustainably in comparison to profitability. Of course, we also have cost and regulation imposition from our net zero commitments, our carbon taxes and all of the things that are being imposed on businesses in Australia.

So costs are going through the roof—industrial costs, costs of doing business, costs of components coming into the country and more. Everything is costing more. Yet what we see from the government is: 'I will give you a small bit of public money rather than focusing on the core of the problem, which is: how do we reduce cost structures, what is the competitive advantage Australia can see again, and can we have a reduced power cost profile for manufacturing?' Well, there is no solution to that, and there is no solution coming forward. All industrial users report that the cost of their new energy contracts is much higher than that of their existing contracts. We have no industrial relief; the government will provide none. The productivity roundtable produced exactly zero ideas that the government have said they will agree to on lowering costs through productivity.

So what is the government's response to whole sectors of our industry being on their knees? They say, 'We've got some government public money that we're going to borrow and put into some funds, and we'll ask them to give you a bit of it to keep your operations going for a while.' That doesn't smell like success to me. We do need a 'future made in Australia' policy that recognises that the cost structures of doing business in Australia are at record highs and our international competitiveness is at record lows. Private sector investment is at a record low in Australia.

Even the Treasurer has discovered that this is a problem, even if it was by reading the book Abundance, I understand. I actually endorse the book Abundance,becauseit actually says what people on the left of centre should have realised for a long time: you can't kill the private sector. We need it to pay the bills. That's the essence of the book. So I do endorse that book, yes. We do need the private sector to survive. They do something useful for the government. They do pay the bills. So I welcome the fact that he's found it. I'd say to him that we must do more to make Australia competitive again and see growth again.

If there is zero private sector investment—and, anecdotally, big business chambers and some of the biggest business representatives across the country have come to see me. I won't identify them here, because everyone lives in terror of the Albanese government's supermajority. But they made the point—I think quite sensibly—that they had gone through all of their members around the country—big businesses and everyone who does a lot of foreign investment—and looked at the state of Victoria as one case study, and they said that there had been basically no big new private sector investment in Victoria for two to three years. Nothing has come on. Now, I'm from New South Wales. I love Sydney, and I'm not a huge fan of Melbourne in the Sydney-Melbourne dynamic. But I will say this: I don't find it good that in the state of Victoria there is no new private sector investment. There must be new big-scale private sector investment in the state of Victoria, including Melbourne. So, whatever settings are broken down there in the government and whatever they're doing to discourage private sector investment, you need this. You don't have to believe me—I don't ask any government members to listen to me at all—but grab Abundance and open it up and have a look. That's what it says in there. Abundance says that. That's all the rage in leftie circles. So have a look at it. It says, 'Don't kill the private sector in your state, because they have to pay the bills at the end of the day.' You should really pay attention to Abundance. Don't listen to a word I'm saying; I honestly say, 'Don't do it.' I'm not saying it's a good book; read it. I encourage everybody, including my left-wing friends, to read Abundance.

The settings for Australia are quite serious. We're at a time when our cost structures are going through the roof. That's why the Reserve Bank governor warned—it wasn't picked up, but she warned very clearly—that there would be no price deflation in the foreseeable future. That wasn't widely reported, but what that means, in relation to the cost of everything, is that nothing is going down in the foreseeable future, so costs are going to remain unsustainably high for all our goods and services. As to whether wages will try and catch up with prices, she's saying they're not going to do that. Normally, we would have periods of price deflation where costs and things come down, and there would be a catching-up because of downward pressure as well as upward pressure. The Reserve Bank governor is signalling to the government and the economy that we're in for a difficult time. There will be no price deflation. It's a very serious warning that hasn't got enough attention, in my opinion, because prices are going to stay very high.

So the government does need to pay attention to this. More regulation is not the answer, and more and more difficult regulation is not the answer. We have some of the world records in regulation in terms of our business sectors. Our competitive advantages have been eroded over time—sometimes by deliberate design; sometimes accidentally, to be fair to the government; and sometimes because things have changed under us. But all of them acting together means our country needs a new economic compact to be able to see more growth and to see our cost structures come down. It will be unsustainable for the government to hand out and subsidise sector after sector with public finances. We're already seeing the broken nature of this model, so we must come up with cost-competitive and pro-economy models.

The government started by saying: 'That's exactly what we will do. We will have a productivity summit. We will have an economic roundtable.' We're all still waiting for the memo of what happened at the economic roundtable. What came out of the economic roundtable? Where are these productivity measures? What is going to happen to our economy? Well, the government's gone silent on that. So either they've got some really, really good ideas from the summit that they haven't told us about yet and they're working on them or they're working on other things that they came up with that they already had agreed to—well, we're going to find out which. Or they still don't know what they're going to do about it.

Now, I'm thinking we don't have a lot of time. There are cost pressures for most businesses that have come to me, and they say their profits are very, very thin. The margins have dropped in small, medium and large businesses. Large businesses are asking for bailouts and handouts. Medium and small businesses are collapsing at record levels, and insolvencies are through the roof. This is more than just the post-COVID period. That is not the answer to what we are seeing. There are serious collapses of small and micro and medium businesses in our country, and they cannot be explained by the post-COVID period.

The government's response, so far, is to say we had a summit. Now, that's fine if it produces results, to be frank. But, if it doesn't produce results, we're going to see these trends continue—no private sector investment, soaring housing costs and the costs of doing business, and an increase in business collapses. The public finances can't get us through this period. There are only so many times the government can pay a small amount of a person's power bill or hand out money to a business to keep it going. The public finances will not sustain that in the long run. We must bring down costs, see cost structures come down and improve our competitive advantages.

And we can do these things. We have an energy abundance, and yet we're charging the highest rates for power of all the developed countries from our own citizens and businesses. Why are we doing that when we have all the resources in the world? We need to be smarter and better and take a pure economic focus into the next few years, or we are sleepwalking into a disaster. And so, with that in mind, that will be my prime focus for the next three years—improving the ability for the private sector and our economy to, again, do the heavy lifting for Australia in growth, in prosperity and in paying the government's bills too, which would be a bonus for the Labor Party.

The government's going broke. The answer is not to do more taxes; it's not to introduce more charges on people. Let's grow the economy again. Let's listen to abundance. Let's have abundance. Let's bring it back. I don't care if you do that in a left-wing context or a right-wing context. Abundance means we grow the economy, we let people succeed again and we stop holding them back, as the Prime Minister might say. Well, we're holding back the Australian economy at the moment. We can do better. We will do better. We might need to change the government to do that, but we will support any measure from the government that reduces taxes or increases productivity in the meantime. We await with bated breath to see if they'll do it.