Time to hear Peter Dutton’s best policy ideas

The domestic issues dominating federal politics – inflation, low productivity, government spending, industrial relations, housing, growing intervention by the government in the economy and energy – underline the need for a more searching contest of ideas. Nine months or fewer from an election, with the Albanese government and the opposition level pegging on the two-party-preferred vote in Newspoll, Peter Dutton has ratcheted up pressure on Labor. The Opposition Leader’s next step, however, should be to provide a blueprint of how a Coalition government would change the nation’s direction that currently seems fixated on big government without a strategy for improving productivity, which is key to reducing inflation and lifting growth.

Opposing the government’s $22.7bn Future Made in Australia agenda, opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor told parliament on Tuesday it was a plan for more “pork barrelling” and “more government, not more business investment”. Manu­facturers, he said, would benefit more from stronger policies aimed at “getting the basics right”. These included “affordable and reliable energy, flexible workplaces, less regulation and an incentive-based tax system”. That is a good place for the opposition to start. Sluggish productivity, the main barrier to growth, needs to be central to its policies. Would an incentive-based tax system include cuts to Australia’s uncompetitive 30 per cent corporate tax rate? If so, what spending would be reduced to offset the loss of revenue? The issue of how and where the Coalition would inject flexibility for employers and workers back into the IR system is also crucial. It should be part of the Coalition’s strategy for lifting productivity to increase growth and the revenue base. Mr Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants across the nation by 2050, with the first to be operational in just over a decade, deserves careful consideration. Cost benefits need to be released as soon as possible for scrutiny alongside those of Labor’s renewables energy strategy.

Labor’s vast expansion of the so-called care economy is not productivity. Good service provision and a fair public safety net funded by a strong economy are important for living standards, but having taxpayers subsidising the wages of non-public service staff is a dilemma. While the move is popular politically with almost 200,000 childcare workers who will receive an extra $150 a week, the opposition has yet to declare its position on that outlay. After taking the fight up to Mr Albanese, Mr Dutton’s challenge is to prosecute an alternative vision.