Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely. You would think a government attuned to the feeling of the nation right now would use this opportunity to fess up and admit they have an awful lot of making up to do for the abject failure and disappointment of the last year. You would think the recent election would at least provide some point of reflection for members opposite—oh, he has left—because the Australian people were pretty clear in the brutalising result for Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal government. The Prime Minister's lack of vision led to the loss of 14 seats across Australia. Smile all you like. The government's so-called win literally could not have been narrower.

Communities right across Australia sent a clear message to those opposite, but it seems the message was lost on the Prime Minister and each of the coalition members we have heard from this afternoon. For their benefit in particular, the message was simple: start paying attention to the real issues that people care about in their day-to-day lives. Stop meddling with Medicare and quit this obsessive preoccupation with ripping money out of health and hospitals and handing big tax breaks to hugely already profitable companies. Start delivering on your education promises and reverse the government's abandonment of the Gonski model that you promised to match. Stop trying to distract from the real issues affecting working people and stop giving a green light to the right-wing of your party to go on ideological crusades that are divisive, expensive and downright indulgent.

This government lurches from disappointment to disappointment, humiliation to humiliation. They cannot seem to go a fortnight without another stuff-up. When will it stop? When will this government start talking about the real issues facing the people in this country? It is a pretty clear indictment on the Prime Minister's failed year of leadership when his own people cannot name a single achievement. The Prime Minister's own colleagues decided to desert him and headed home early in the very first week of parliament—day 2—as if they had been elected to lounge around in their own self-importance and skip out on discussing the things that matter. The Prime Minister's personal failure with regard to the NBN will surely be viewed in years to come as the largest and most harmful infrastructure failure of our time. He calls himself a feminist, but has five fewer female members in the House than Tony Abbott did. He is out of touch. He failed to appoint a minister for small business until the community reacted with outrage. There was the $50 billion corporate tax cut to the big end of town, while his Treasurer flies around the country lecturing working men and women about living within their means. And the suggestion that the serious issue of housing unaffordability could be solved by getting wealthy parents to shell out for you is an outrage. His own MPs describe his performance as wishy-washy and his senators are told to review their favourite TV shows in the chamber instead of discussing anything real or meaningful.

When I was looking for his list of achievements, I dug deep. I even consulted Google and this is what it returned—that is all we could get: blank white paper. It is simply not good enough, and I hear time after time that people expect more. This is not some frivolous issue to be dismissed as opportunism from our side. It speaks to the serious lack of delivery from this government and the impact it is having on local communities.

My electorate of Lindsay has the most under-pressure hospital in our state, Nepean Hospital, which looks after 350,000 people in Western Sydney. More than half of the emergency patients are forced to wait longer than the national benchmark of four hours to be admitted. I hear, time after time, stories of patients having to wait 15 hours or more to be admitted into the emergency department. I hear constantly from our nurses and our doctors, who provide exceptional care but are frustrated year after year by Liberal government budget cuts and policy indifference. I expect that, if you stopped anyone on the streets in my electorate in Penrith, St Marys, Emu Plains, Jordon Springs or Kingswood, they would beg this Prime Minister to stop throwing away $170 million on a wasteful and unnecessary opinion poll and direct the money to the local hospital instead. That is on top of the $50 billion handout to big business that will gift more than $7 billion directly to Australia's big four banks, the most profitable banking industry in the world—I should get a job there—and one which is ridden by systemic failures that cripple hardworking customers and small businesses for nothing more than profiteering. The people on the streets of Lindsay would tell this Prime Minister to use this money to reverse the cuts to bulk-billing and pathology services, reinstate a proper school funding model and build a proper NBN in the suburbs of Lindsay where they cannot even access ADSL at the moment. The people of Lindsay and Australia deserve more.

See this speech in context