Well, thanks, Stutch. Ladies and gentlemen, it's absolutely fantastic to be here.
Unexpectedly, I was expecting to give a speech on defence, but of course I have had to pivot as you did, Stutch, but it is a great honour to be here at the CIS to give this speech, my second speech, my first one outside of the Canberra bubble, as you rightly said Mike, but it is a great honour to be here.
Can I acknowledge my wonderful colleagues who are here today, Jane Hume, the new Deputy of the Party, and Senator James Paterson, who are great friends, great colleagues and great supporters. It's wonderful to have both of you here today.
I'm also wanted to have the former Prime Minister John Howard in the audience, and he is obviously someone who is a real role model to all of us in the Liberal Party, but to me in particular, and his advice over the years has been enormously important to me. He should not be attributed with any of the pluses or minuses of what I have done over the years, but at the end of the day he's been an extraordinary, extraordinary role model. Stutch, congratulations on your new role, or not so new now.
I think the role of the CIS, as we just heard, is more important than ever, and it's wonderful to have you at the helm when we need someone with economic clout talking about the issues that really matter for Australia.
I'm glad to be with you here today. I commend the entire CIS team and the work that you continue to do. I do get a chance to keep an eye on it and read as much of it as I can because it is fantastic policy work and we will continue to take it as very valuable input in
our thinking.
Can I also say that I have great gratitude for the work that's been done by the CIS over a long period of time, right back to 1976 and I've been following it since my days as an economic student all those years ago in the 80s at Sydney University. It has been a great incubator of ideas that have informed public opinion and shaped public policy and I have no doubt it will continue to do so.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't intend to speak at length today and we'll save much of the discussion for the Q&A but I do want to make some important points following up from my press conference on Friday about our country where it's going and about the resolve of the Liberal Party.
All is not well in Australia from our cities to our coastal communities to our regional towns. Australians are struggling and they are anxious.
Prices are through the roof, inflation and interest rates are going back up, intergenerational debt is accumulating like never before. By around April this year, we're going to have a trillion dollars of gross debt. Home ownership is out of reach for so many Australians. Businesses, small and large, are being suffocated by red tape and militant unions. Industries are going overseas, record immigration has been adding pressures to housing, to infrastructure, to services. Our borders have been open to people who hate our way of life.
People who don't want to change for Australia, but who want Australia to change for them. Crime is widespread and we've had the worst terrorist attack on our soil in our history perpetrated by an Islamist extremist, two. And our defence force is underfunded for the dangers of our times.
Labor promised that we would be better off under a Labor government, but Australians have seen the exact opposite. Australians are seeing affordability, aspiration and opportunity evaporate. Australians are seeing a once confident nation be set by uncertainty, a nation adrift on a sea of troubles, and a nation not in control of its destiny.
They're seeing the country they love, change for the worse. And that's why on Friday I was crystal clear about the first priorities of a Liberal Party under my leadership. They are to protect our way of life and to restore our standard of living.
Now protecting our way of life is about many things. It's about re-establishing home ownership as the centrepiece of the Australian dream. It's about expanding childcare instead of forcing every family into the same universal system. It's about strengthening education by focusing on core knowledge, education not indoctrination. It's about properly funding our defence force to deter threats and aggression in an age where the so-called rules-based order has been exposed as wishful thinking. It's about celebrating our history and our values and nurturing a deep love of country and it's about having an immigration policy that puts the interests of Australians first.
Immigration in particular is a key concern for Australians. Numbers have been too high, standards have been too low and both must change. We are a great immigrant nation, but we must get it right.
Under my leadership, the Liberal Party is resolute and resolved on getting immigration right. Resolute in lowering immigration levels, resolved to put Australian values at the centre of our immigration policy. And that's why I say again, if someone doesn't subscribe to our core beliefs, the door must be shut. If someone wants to import the hatred and violence of another place to our shores, the door must be shut.
From immigration to home ownership to childcare and education, to defence and national pride, there is much I'll be saying in the coming weeks and months about protecting our way of life as a nation. But today I want to focus primarily on the Liberal Party's priority of
restoring our standard of living, restoring a rising standard of living.
Now in simple terms, our living standards have been going backwards to the Albanese government's failure in two critical areas. Energy policy and economic policy. Everything is costing more because Australians in homes, in businesses, factories, energy has become more expensive. Higher energy prices spread right across the economy. Driven by their net zero ideology, Labor has turned its back on cheap and reliable energy. Albanese and Bowen would gladly spend trillions of taxpayers' dollars over decades to try to reach net zero. Labor is driven by a moral duty to reduce emissions that will reduce our living standards. In contrast, my moral duty is to restore our standard of living by restoring cheap and reliable energy. And I'm looking forward to announcing in due course a shadow energy minister who will take the energy policy fight to Labour with grit and with gravitas.
Just as the government has a disastrous energy policy, it has a ruinous economic policy. Anthony Albanese promised that big government, under his leadership, would fix Australia's problems. As Prime Minister, he has expanded government power unlike any before him. He's transforming Australia from a free market economy into a government-directed economy. And his actions have been defined by three typical traits of big government-leaning leaders: more taxes, more regulation and more spending. Just consider these facts.
Under Labor, personal income taxes have reached a record as a share of the economy. Carbon taxes have been going into place on the family vehicle, on manufacturing, on electricity. Indeed last Friday, Labor sought to quietly release a review that paves the way for the government to impose a carbon tax on imported products, yet another one. And it doesn't stop there. Labor's planning other new taxes, on your home, on your superannuation, on your children's future.
Under Labor there's been 5,000 new regulations that are like sand in the gears of the economy. Last year was the worst year on record for business insolvencies, and contrary to the Prime Minister's desire for a future made in Australia, what we're actually seeing is a future made abroad as businesses keep moving offshore.
Government spending, is a proportion of the economy, is at a 40-year high outside of the pandemic, up from 24% to 27% of GDP since Labor came to power.
And is it any surprise? Billions have been spent on energy subsidies addressing the symptom, not the cause of Labor's policy disaster on energy.
Billions have been handed out to green energy industries. And billions have been expended to bloat the bureaucracy. Just last week, we discovered through Senate estimates this shocking fact. Since the election, there's been a $54 billion blowout in the medium-term budget bottom line.
Labor has a dangerous addiction to spending other people's money. After all this taxation, all this regulation and all this spending, here's the truth: bigger government hasn't meant better government. Big government hasn't meant a better Australia. And bigger government hasn't meant Australians are better off. And that's why I said on Friday that bigger government isn't the solution to Australia's problems, Australians are the solution to Australia's problems.
I want better government that puts faith back in Australians. My commitment to Australians is that the Liberal Party I lead will have a freedom agenda at its core. What do I mean by this? I want a return of government that gets the big things right but gets off your back. I want workers to be freer, paying less tax. I want businesses to be freer, liberated from the reams of government paperwork that turns ambition into anxiety. And I want industries to be freer, unencumbered by roadblocks, so that we can make more onshore instead of seeing
manufacturing continue to go offshore. I want Australians to be freer by eradicating the nanny state and giving you more choice. By reviving our freedom, we can enable a revival of investment and productivity and restore the conditions and confidence
that will grow our economy and restore our living standards and a rising living standard. As I said, under Labor, the scales have been tipped towards a state-directed economy. This must be flipped back and that means there's a need to reduce wasteful government spending.
Of course, there will always be areas of the economy where the taxpayer money needs to be spent prudently and for good reasons. For example, our health system, our major infrastructure, on the defence force, on border security to name a few. But under Labor, reckless spending is fueling inflation. A link that's been confirmed by the Reserve Bank Governor in recent days and a reason why the RBA recently raised interest rates. We know that government must live within its means so that Australians have the means to live. And right now Australians don't have that means to live because we have a government that is not living within its means.
American economist, Thomas Sowell, wrote:
"The big problem with money created by the government is that those who run the government always face the temptation to create more money and spend it."
The Albanese government has succumbed to this temptation. Everything is costing more for Australians, not only because energy is costing more, everything is costing more, because government is spending more. The more Labor spends, the more prices inflate,
the more you pay for your groceries, for your rent, for your mortgage, for your children's school fees, for insurance, and that's why Labor's reckless spending must stop.
In the recent AFR column, reporter Luke Kinsella noted that out of 35 advanced economies, Australia is only one of nine that lacks annual spending reviews. Many economists are rightly calling for a spending review, especially one conducted independent of Treasury and finance. It's hard to see such an independent review proceeding under Labor and frankly we cannot wait for a new government to arrest the wasteful spending that's hurting every Australian. Something needs to happen now.
In war time or in crisis, there is a precedent for a government and opposition, to set aside their differences for the good of the nation. In World War II, Robert Menzies and John Curtin formed an Advisory War Council. John Howard worked to support major economic reforms for the Paul Keating government, reforms that he proposed when he was treasurer. Together they set Australia up for three decades of prosperity. The lesson is that setting up a prosperous economy requires us to put Australians first; not politics, not egos. And it's in that spirit that I wrote to the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday proposing the establishment of a bipartisan taskforce on spending restraint. A taskforce comprising equal numbers of government and opposition members. A taskforce with the objective of identifying and agreeing to practical measures to reduce inflationary spending and commence budget repair. A taskforce about restoring spending discipline - not reaching deeper into the pockets of hardworking Australians. Any measure that could be agreed to would remain subject to the usual parliamentary and party processes.
Now, in making this proposal to the Prime Minister, I was clear-eyed. We won't agree on everything, given our respective party philosophies. But we shouldn't shy away from the
opportunity to try to identify measures on which we can agree. Now I know the Treasurer has been very thin-skinned about this this morning and rejected the proposal. I'm not interested in the Treasurer's ego. I'm interested in fighting for hardworking Australians.
My message is clear to the business community and to everyone in this room. Back this in. Urge the Prime Minister to reconsider. Let us work together to strengthen our government, our budgets, in other words make sure that the spending is lower than it otherwise would have been, end the waste and beat inflation. For Australians who are working two jobs to pay the mortgage and we see that wherever we go.
We need to restore our standard of living, and protect our way of life. Because right now, hard decisions must be made in the national interest, and hard decisions will need to be made more quickly through bipartisanship than could be made alone. To end our nation's cost of living crisis, we need to get this right, to diffuse the trillion dollars of intergenerational debt that is accumulating and will be with us by April. We need to restore our standard of living for Australians today and tomorrow. That's my goal. That's the Liberal Party's goal and frankly, that should be the Albanese government's goal as well.
On that note, I look forward to your questions, Stutch, and thank you very much again for having me here today.
