CQ Today – Labor floored by a ‘Dixer’

The most popular female journalist of the early 1900s wrote under the pen name “Dorothy Dix”. Ms Dix’s columns were largely made up of homespun advice about how to stay happy, stay married, and lead a full life. Ms Dix wrote from Louisiana, but her columns were syndicated in Australian newspapers. It was commonly accepted that many of the “questions” she responded to were actually ones she wrote herself, not sent in by readers. This practice coined the Australian slang “Dorothy Dixer” — meaning a question that you have written for yourself to give yourself an easy answer. Today, most Dorothy Dixers are asked in Parliament when one side of politics lobs an easy question to a Minister from their own team in the House, the Senate, or committee hearings. Last week, I breached this principle when I asked a “Dixer” to the Labor Finance Minister. It should have been easy for her. I simply asked, “What elements of your Budget help increase productivity?” Under this Labor Government, productivity has fallen five per cent in four years. We have never had a four-year period in recorded economic history over which productivity has even been negative. Now, under this Government, that record has been smashed with a five per cent reduction. It is not as if this problem has been unknown to the Government. Last year, they invited the nation’s industry, financial, and union leaders to Canberra for a “productivity roundtable”. At the start of that roundtable, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said that “in one of the first Cabinet meetings after the election we decided to put productivity at the very core of our second-term agenda” — because “that’s the best way to lift living standards and make people better off”. With that background and focus, you would expect the Finance Minister to easily answer my Dorothy Dixer. After making productivity the “core” of their agenda, she should have been able to give a clear and substantial answer listing the Government’s policies to turn around our poor productivity performance. That is not what happened. Instead, the Finance Minister struggled and said, “There is a glossy — an A4 there.” In Canberra language, a “glossy” is one of those brochures full of pictures of smiling people that sells the Government’s policies. The Finance Minister could not immediately point to tangible things the Government is doing on productivity because this Government has given up on economic growth and opportunity. Their Budget is not a plan to improve our economy — it is a plan to increase taxes. Tax increases won’t improve our economic performance. Since the Government’s own productivity roundtable, productivity has fallen another half a per cent. What we need instead is a plan to restore Australian living standards by cutting taxes, reducing government spending, slashing red tape, and reducing migration. The Liberal and Nationals Parties have a plan to do exactly that: get rid of the “inflation tax” that makes you pay more every year; remove the $80 billion of net zero spending that is blowing out government Budgets, reduce the National Construction Code back to 200 pages, cutting the cost of building a home by $70,000, and cut migration so there are more homes for Australians and more investment in Australian skills. These are real measures that will deliver a real lift to productivity. If productivity had grown at its average rate this century of 1.4 per cent per year — instead of falling as it has under Labor — then the annual incomes of Australians would be $4200 better off. If Labor asks me a Dorothy Dixer about what we would do about productivity, we have a real answer for the Australian people.