Damian Drum (Murray, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great opportunity that I have been given to talk about this motion, which somehow seems to try to portray that this government is in some sort of chaos. If you observe what has gone on here in our short time, you will see that an amazing situation was arrived at with the superannuation reforms. There were some concerns at the initial announcement. What we saw behind the scenes was a range of meetings between our financial leaders—the Treasurer, the Minister for Finance—with a whole range of backbenchers who were representing their communities. We landed on a spot that everybody can live with. There are still significant savings for the budget and that is where we are now moving to. We have moved to a situation where we have a Prime Minister who is fully committed to fixing up the budget in a real and meaningful way. We understand that our political opponents, Labor, stand for more debt. They stand for increased taxes, and there is no way known that they are going to have the capacity within themselves to make any hard decisions for the betterment of this country and the future of this country.

Recently we have looked at a $195 billion investment in the defence system. We know that for six years Labor spent zero dollars on these big-ticket items that needed to be invested in. Previously, in another life, I was the minister for veterans affairs in the Victorian government and had many of the senior Army, Air Force and Navy personnel talking to me about the lack of investment by the Labor Party, at that stage in government in Australia. Again we find that the coalition, on this side of the House, sees that we have to invest in the long-term strategic defence of Australia.

We also understand that, in regional Victoria, mobile communications blackspots are an incredibly important issue. We stand by our record, having invested in over 490 mobile phone towers right around Australia. When we compare that to our political opponents in Labor, over six years when they were in control of the country they did not invest in one mobile phone tower. They turn their back on regional Victoria and turn their back on some of the most important issues such as communications. Their deplorable effort when they attempted to roll the National Broadband Network out across Australia was absolutely pathetic, and yet here we are now, rolling out the NBN—still with some challenges, yes, but we are certainly connecting up more and more of Australia than Labor could ever have hoped for.

We have passed legislation on personal income tax and company tax. This has been proven by the economists as the way to grow our country. Again, it is a tough decision to go down this path, to ensure that we create the opportunity where we can grow further jobs and the economy, but certainly it is one of the tough decisions that have been made by a cohesive government.

We have also seen the Prime Minister come to the aid and the defence of Victoria's Country Fire Authority. What an amazing act that was. We have a Premier in Victoria who, for some reason, is hell-bent on destroying that volunteer base. Quite unbelievably, he does not seem to be able to go left or right on this one; he is just stuck in the headlights. He has done whatever he could do to undermine the wealth of knowledge and the command of the CFA and its volunteers so that he can be beholden to the United Firefighters Union and those unionists—who obviously have photos, I might say. They have something over Daniel Andrews. We are not quite sure what it is. However, he has sacked ministers, he has sacked the board and he has sacked the chief fire officer. He has sacked nearly everybody who has previously had a role in the CFA—and if he could sack the volunteers he would, except he does not have that sort of control over them. It has been an enormous mess, and now legislation has been passed by the Prime Minister that will see those volunteers given protection from any legislation passed in the future that will impact them.

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