Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Sydney had no energy, no conviction, no policy and no ideas in that little speech, because—you know why, Mr Speaker—she is part of the guilty party. She is part of the party that took a situation with no government debt and no interest on that debt and gave us a trajectory of $667 billion worth of debt and an interest bill of $1 billion a month, growing to $3 billion a month.

Who could forget those 21,000 cheques for $900 to dead people, and those 27,000 cheques for $900 to people overseas? Who could forget that deadly, costly, pink batt disaster? Who could forget the cash for clunkers? Who could forget the overpriced school halls? Who could forget the $11 billion wasted on a failed border protection policy that tragically saw lives lost at sea? Who could forget the more than $29 billion wasted on an NBN? And who could forget having six small-business ministers in just six years? And now the member for Sydney is walking out, cowardly, from this place because she has refused to listen to the arguments and refused to take the blame for her poor performance as part of a government that received the lowest primary vote in 100 years! Her party, because of its poor economic performance, received the lowest primary vote in 100 years!

In contrast, this government, has got on with the job of creating more than 300,000 jobs, and more than 170,000 jobs for women so that female workforce participation is at its highest levels since records first began. Who can forget those three free trade agreements with our biggest trading partners in Asia—with Korea, Japan and China? There is a fault line here in this parliament between those on this side of the House, who believe in jobs through free trade, and those sitting opposite, who believe in xenophobic campaigns that are run at the behest of the union movement.

Mr Speaker, did you know that the 95 per cent of all of the goods that we export to China will be tariff free over the life of this agreement? Did you know that Australian dairy farmers are currently behind their New Zealand cousins, because New Zealand has no tariffs on its dairy? They will benefit from this agreement. Or did you know that Australian wine producers, that currently have up to a 14 per cent tariff on their exports to China, are behind their New Zealand cousins, who do not have any tariffs? We will all benefit under this agreement.

What about in financial services? There are 400,000 jobs in Australia in financial services. That is nearly 10 per cent of our economy. We will be supercharged in the financial services sector by virtue of this China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, because we are good in wealth management, we are good in banking and we are good in superannuation. And they are the products that we will export into Asia, and we will benefit from the three billion people that enter into that middle-class over the coming decades.

What about our small businesses in Australia—the more than two million businesses that employ more than four million people who benefit from the lowest small-business company tax rates in Australia's history as a result of Joe Hockey's last budget? Who can benefit more than small business and big business from the more than $2 trillion that we have cut from red tape? Who can benefit from those innovative policies, like getting rid of the employee share ownership schemes that existed under Labor? Under this government we have produced a much more small-business-friendly employee share ownership scheme. And what about in tax and what we have done to abolish the carbon and mining taxes? We have not gone through with Labor's policies of billions of extra dollars on superannuation, negative gearing and multinational taxes that ACCI and the BCA say will send investment and jobs offshore. What about our infrastructure policies, which are a record $50 billion spend on infrastructure projects like the WestConnex. It would have been on the East West Link too, but for the Labor Party introducing sovereign risk into this country by ripping up contracts.

You see those on the opposite side, led by the Leader of the Opposition, are not fit to govern again, because they do not recognise the fault of their ways and they do not recognise that we in the coalition are best placed to serve the Australian people.

See this speech in context