Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

This place gets pretty weird sometimes. It certainly has today. As I think the speaker before me said, this MPI, 'the government not being focused on the interests of Australians'—I don't know who wrote that, but let's talk about it.

Deputy Speaker O'Brien, you sit through the MPI every day. I'm sure you would hope that the opposition—a constructive opposition—would come in today and say, 'Okay, we're going through a pandemic, we're going through an issue that is causing economic stress on our economy,' and they'd come up with something like, 'You might be doing this okay, but we think you as a government should be doing this as well, or direct a bit of the resources from there to there; we think that would be a better idea.' Have you heard anything like that today, Deputy Speaker? I know you haven't, because I've been listening to them all, and there hasn't been one constructive idea articulated by the other side in this whole MPI today. There are two more to go. Hopefully one of them will actually come up with an idea.

We had the opposition leader crack what I think he thought were a few funny one-liners, and they all laughed on cue. But there were no actual ideas. We had the member for Griffith, who went through something about Campbell Newman, the previous LNP government in Queensland, and took some cheap shots at them—obviously because there's a Queensland election this weekend. As for the member for Oxley, I actually couldn't work out what he was saying. He seemed to be all over the shop. I even think he thought the Pacific Highway was in Queensland at one stage. But I'll leave that aside.

I want to go through some things that we should be talking about, and I'll bring them up today—the great challenges we have and how the government is focused on the interests of Australians. First, I want to go through some statistics that I think are very interesting about how Australia is performing relative to the rest of the world, not only in pandemic statistics but also economically, and what we as a government are doing to make sure that Australia does as well as it can through what are very challenging times, Deputy Speaker, as you well know. Johns Hopkins University has been tracking deaths per hundred thousand of population throughout the entire globe. I'm going to give you some comparisons. The deaths per 100,000 of the population in Australia is 3.63—all tragic. The USA is at 69.2. The UK is at 68.36 per hundred thousand. Canada is a lot lower, but still much higher than Australia, at 27.12. Has there been anyone from the other side saying, 'Look, I think we've done reasonably well and the government has done reasonably well on the pandemic front?' No. There's just cheap shots.

The other thing that was weird this week was when the opposition leader moved a suspension of standing orders before question time and wanted to talk about Daniel Andrews' performance in Victoria. Well, blow me down! They've been the one problem—the Victorian government—with the way they did quarantine and the way they messed that up. They're actually the one thing, statistically, that has put us worse off than we otherwise would have been.

Let's also look at the economy. Obviously this pandemic has caused great challenges for Australia but also great challenges across the globe. We've heard that Australia's economy—as tragic as it has been—has contracted by seven per cent in the June quarter. That is not good for anybody. It has been a great challenge for the men and women of Australia, for the businesses of Australia and for the wage-earners of Australia. But let's look at a comparison. I have a great friend over in New Zealand—a lot of people laud on the left. Their economy has contracted by 12.2 per cent. And Canada by 11 per cent, France by 13 per cent and the United Kingdom by nearly 20 per cent.

On the pandemic, and the management of this health risk, Australia has done very well. Economically, while we've been doing it tough, we have certainly done better than most comparable countries overseas. We know that the Treasurer has spoken more recently about consumer confidence being up, especially since the budget has come out.

What did we do with the budget? The budget this year was a really important budget, because we know about the health crisis and the economic crisis and what that's doing to people's jobs and livelihoods. Because we have so many people on our side of politics who have worked in private enterprise and have, very importantly, employed people—like my good friend the member for Petrie here, who has employed people in his pest business—we know that eight out of 10 jobs are in the private sector. What was the budget targeted on? The budget was targeted upon doing everything we can do to help those people who employ others and those people who are in the private sector, because they are the people who create the wealth and will grow us out of this crisis.

See this speech in context