Adjournment Debate - Digital Economy

I take this opportunity to talk about the proposition that technological innovation in the digital economy is key to Australia's growth in productivity and prosperity. Productivity is the measure of the amount of output you get for a given amount of input, be that input the number of hours worked or the dollars of capital invested, or what economists call total factor productivity, which is everything put together. Unfortunately, Australia has a productivity problem. Over the long run, our productivity has grown at an average of 1.5 per cent per year, but that's been slowing. Since the Albanese government has come to power, things have got much worse. In total, productivity grew by 11.4 per cent over the term of the last coalition government. Over a single year of this government, almost half of that has been lost.

As the Business Council observed in its recently released report Seize the moment, 'On our current path, we face the real risk of Australia being overtaken by the rest of the world and Australians being worse off for generations to come.' But the report also highlighted the ways that Australia could boost its productivity, including through the better use of technology.

In my work as shadow minister for the digital economy I've seen plenty of examples of this process at work. Consider the way the provision of small-business finance is changing. Lenders can apply artificial intelligence to the banking records of a business—contained of course in digital files—to determine factors such as the earnings and the cash flow of that business, seasonal variations, growth rates and much else. As I've heard from lenders as varied as NAB, Block and Shift, this is making it possible to provide finance to businesses when, on more traditional criteria, that might have been declined. In turn, that means more small and medium businesses are able to secure finance, pursue growth opportunities, serve customers and create jobs. It also stimulates competition, as more businesses compete to provide ultimately better products and services, and that means a productivity improvement.

Unfortunately, the Albanese Labor government is getting the policy settings completely wrong when it comes to leveraging technology and the digital economy to drive productivity and growth. Part of the problem lies in what the current government is not doing. It does not have a minister for the digital economy. It does not have a clear national goal for Australia to be a leading digital economy. And, under this government, we have seen the Digital Transformation Agency being effectively nobbled. It's been shifted deep into the bowels of the Department of Finance, and projects on which this agency is supposedly working, such as a national digital identity, seem to be on the perpetual go-slow.

A very big part of the problem under this government is its focus on prosecuting a union driven agenda which is deeply hostile to the kind of workplace flexibility and choice which typically is a feature of technology businesses and the technology sector. This has been on full display recently in this government's demonisation of the digital economy.

We know that over the last 20 years Australians have enthusiastically taken up service offerings delivered over digital platforms which deliver greater choice and convenience, which save time and which often save money as well. That has delivered benefits both to those providing goods and services over those platforms and to those consuming the goods and services. Platforms such as Freelancer, Uber, Menulog, Airtasker and, in the disability services sector, Mable have become well known to many Australians. The Albanese government, however, is actively hostile. The workplace relations minister calls the gig economy a cancer. That is an insult to the many millions of Australians who have chosen to organise their life and work around these platforms, whether as a provider of goods and services or as a consumer of goods and services.

Just today this minister, this backward-looking minister with such an affection for the rigid industrial arrangements of the 1950s, introduced draconian laws that, if passed, will adversely impact the digital platforms that millions of Australians have embraced. The reason is pretty obvious. The union bosses hate the gig economy. They want to go back in time 50 years or more to when most employment was full time, most workplaces were unionised and union bosses were all-powerful.

The growth of the digital economy is key to improving Australia's productivity and to our future prosperity. To achieve this, we need the right policies settings and a government that actually believes in the benefits of digital platforms and technology. Right now we very clearly have a government which is focused on returning Australia to the past, and this is very bad news for all Australians.