Thursday, 20 September 2018

 Mr PERERA (Cranbourne) (15:47): I will be focusing more on the future and less on the past. Let me start by saying that it has been an absolute and great privilege to represent the electorate of Cranbourne in the Victorian Parliament for the past 16 years, for four consecutive terms.

Today is the opportunity to thank everybody who has supported me since getting into Parliament in 2002. They are many in number, and I apologise for my inability to thank all of them individually. I would like to begin by thanking the staff of the Department of Parliamentary Services for the support given to me over my 16 years as an MP. I thank you all very much.

I am also very grateful to many members of my electorate office staff who have worked hard with me over this period of time. A big thankyou to all of you. However, a very special thanks goes out to my right-hand man — or, as we on this side of the house say, my left-hand man — Sammy Argiriou. Sammy has been with me for the past 15 years of my 16-year term and together we have survived three tough marginal seat campaigns. Sammy has shown himself to be very loyal to me and has always supported me and my team with sound advice, guidance and political acumen.

I would also like to thank innumerable people, including those comrades from the Labor Party and the wider labour movement along with supporters and friends from the Indian community for their kind support during many hard-fought campaigns. I thank my constituents for electing me as their representative for four consecutive terms. I would also like to thank all my colleagues from all sides of the Parliament, and their staff, for their support and respect during my tenure here.

Finally, I would like to thank especially my beautiful wife, my beautiful children and their loving families, and many great friends and supporters from the Sri Lankan community who have been right with me throughout this journey. Without their kind support, history would have been written differently.

The highest satisfaction I have derived in my years has been from the work I have done to help out many by going beyond the conventional jurisdictional responsibilities of a state member of Parliament. I have sponsored many people who have been rejected by immigration on their first visitor visa application. These initiatives have been on top of the support I have given to many people in a number of visa categories delivering desirable outcomes for them. Had it not been for these initiatives, many would not have seen the colour of this beautiful country and would not have had the opportunity to spend time together with their family and friends living in Australia and thus make a contribution to the country’s economy.

During the past 16 years, during my representation, areas within the past and current electorate of Cranbourne have had a massive infrastructure boost: new schools, new police stations, many new community and family hubs, sporting complexes, modernised health facilities, hundreds of kilometres of road infrastructure enhancements, substantial improvements to the public transport system — the list goes on and on. It is very pleasing to note the Premier’s recent announcement of the long-awaited Dandenong to Cranbourne line duplication and the work to extend the Cranbourne line out to Clyde.

I will always look back with pride at my contributions in support of the historic pieces of legislation such as abortion law reform, assisted dying, legalising access to medicinal cannabis, medically supervised injecting rooms and other progressive initiatives. I thank the progressive Labor governments for taking those initiatives and giving me the opportunity to be an enthusiastic supporter.

I wish to state my observations about some parliamentary activities. In my view there is a culture developing in the Parliament to go all out and spend way too much time on political pointscoring. This is well below the community’s expectation. It certainly makes me wonder whether there is any value to the Victorian community in shouting down people on their feet, heckling, calling unnecessary quorums, making frivolous points of order and disrupting proceedings during question time. While members of all parliaments have engaged in such fun and games, term after term, focusing only on winning elections and self-advancement, our footwear, clothing and textile industries have disappeared to cheaper labour destinations.

Who would have believed that one day the automobile manufacturing industry would depart our shores? Well, that is exactly what has happened. At times, taxpayer dollars have had to be pumped into the coffers of private investors to keep the jobs in Australia. Even with taxpayer money the car manufacturing industry folded up and left. These business decisions have certainly hit hard on employment levels. As they occurred progressively over a period of time in a disjointed fashion, the economy managed to find jobs for the unemployed, at times with bandaid initiatives from the governments of the day.

The rollout of artificial intelligence and automation through the employment of robotic technology will increase business dynamism and economic growth. This is great; however, research undertaken by the McKinsey Global Institute revealed that massive government intervention will be required to hold societies together against the ravages of labour destruction over the next 13 years. The study says that up to 800 million people, including one-third of the workforce in the US and Germany, will be made jobless by about 2030. This is quite scary to say the least. It is not only factory floor and office jobs that are going to disappear but also the industrial robots augmented with artificial intelligence that will facilitate self-driven cars and trucks, resulting in job shedding in the transport industry as well. The new jobs created by the technology will be sophisticated and high paying, and there is no logic to say that the same unemployed numbers could be placed in those new jobs.

The fourth industrial revolution is also digital like the third, but different in speed, scale and complexity. The fourth industrial revolution is happening in the domains of physical, digital as well as biological spheres, and not only will it help the workers like previous industrial revolutions but it will outright replace them. I know by nature it is hard for the conservative thinkers to accept that things can happen for the first time.

We live in a private investor driven economy where the bottom line is maximisation of profits for the shareholders. Recent figures indicate a 3.1 per cent Australian annual gross domestic product growth; however, figures also indicate that job growth is slowing sharply and there are no real wage gains for the average worker. Private investor companies are not there to provide employment; they are there to employ the most efficient ways of producing goods and services at the lowest cost. It is not rocket science to understand that increasing unemployment in society is directly proportionate to the decreasing buying power of the society. The entrepreneurs who believed that they could increase profits by replacing human beings with machines will now be struggling to sell their own products as a result of increased poverty in society due to unemployment created by their own decisions.

The big tax cuts to all enterprises including the multinationals will definitely lead to employing more technology as opposed to more human beings if and when they decide to allocate a portion of the newfound tax advantage for further investment. There is plenty of evidence that these multinationals who are reluctant to pay their fair share of taxes and the big banks who have exploited their own customers are not there to help out a society.

This is the inevitable crisis situation created by the contradictory nature of the private investor driven economy. This is a global phenomenon, and Australia cannot escape it. In the past 300 years or so the prevailing economic system gave us brutal recessions every four to seven years and the Great Depression. Irrational thinkers, with their antiquated views, believe the private investor driven economy will find its own solutions to these crises as historically every economic downturn was followed by a temporary recovery.

This change is massive and widespread. The private investor driven economy will not be able to handle it at all. This is the beginning of the end of trickle-down economics. The time is fast approaching for the private investor economic systems to follow the same fate as its predecessors, slave and feudal economic arrangements.

Transition to a far more automated society going smoothly rests almost entirely on the choices we make. If the clothing, footwear and textile companies were owned by the workers, they would not have let their jobs be exported to other parts of the world. If the worker-owned businesses choose to install new technology, they will have a plan to work less hours for the week, sharing the work and income with all fellow workers.

The worker self-driven enterprises (WSDEs), commonly known as cooperatives, are gaining momentum in Europe, the UK and many other parts of the world. In the WSDE no separate group of persons — no individual who does not participate in the production work of the enterprise — can be a member of the board of directors. This is economic democracy and is not pie in the sky stuff. The Mondragon Corporation in northern Spain, an umbrella of 102 individual cooperatives owned by over 70 000 worker members, is a reality today.

The Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom is genuinely a no-nonsense task-focused, futuristic political party. The Co-operative Party has produced a blueprint for a 21st century democratic form of public ownership for railways, the energy sector and the water industry that will put power in the hands of many and not the privileged few. This could be a very effective way to reduce power bills. In a unique relationship with the British Labour Party, the Co-operative Party will be an enthusiastic partner of a future Corbyn Labour government that has committed to double the size of the cooperative economy; ensure that workers have a right to own, when a company is facing change of ownership or closure; and establish regional development banks that will help deliver low-cost finances to cooperatives.

The cooperative model challenges us to think beyond the old paradigms of the market versus the state, beyond the divisions between owners and customers, and to think creatively about new ownership and management models. I recommend that the next Parliament set up a parliamentary investigative committee to study and report on matters related to cooperative models and subsequently the impact of technological advancement.

It would also be helpful for the industry portfolio to have added responsibilities for economic democracy and automation. It is wise for the next Parliament to adopt a mechanism to present travel reports to the Parliament, rather than filing them in the library and leaving them to gather dust. It is useful for members to have the opportunity to speak on travel reports, and unfortunately 90 seconds is not adequate timing for that. This would be an ideal way to debate the relevance of modern concepts learned on study tours. In the 21st century there is a lot happening fast outside Australia. New thinking is important to move forward to deliver the best for the future generations.

I wish to end by wishing the next Parliament and the retiring members from this Parliament all the very best of luck. May I also take this opportunity to wish all the very best to the preselected Labor candidate for Cranbourne, Pauline Richards, who would be a great member of Parliament. Thank you and goodbye.

Honourable members applauded.