Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to legislation, the devil is in the detail with this government. It's always the case that, whatever happens, they come out with the headline but never with the follow-up. The follow-up is usually what causes the most pain. This is no exception. As the member for Kingsford Smith rightly pointed out, this is about consumers who are being forced to pay more and to get less. To have a government that says, 'We'll get the minister to decide what happens'—once again, just as we've seen with every other royal commission that's been put forward, the government's decided, 'We'll have a royal commission just to shut people up, but then we'll go ahead and do our own thing.' That's exactly what's happening here.

We see that the minister wants to make the control to have exemptions—talk about putting a fox in charge of the henhouse. This is exactly what will happen: we will see this minister, as we see with other ministers when it comes to this sort of stuff, go and look after his mates and write exemptions carte blanche. The people who will be affected are the consumers—once again.

The one thing you can guarantee when it comes to this government is that they will never, ever stand up for Australians; they stand on them. The only thing they value is money. The only thing they seem to value is ensuring that people are, as they say, put in their place—'know their place', I think, was the term. 'Stick to your knitting' was the catchphrase for this government.

As the member for Kingsford Smith pointed out, we're seeing people who—at a time when we've gone through a tough pandemic and are in the middle of this Morrison recession—might be looking forward to going away for a holiday. Then they're forced to pay exorbitant amounts for something that may not be deliverable. We talk about travel insurance, and we look at things like Qantas. We've already seen the ability of Qantas to be an absolutely wonderful corporate citizen, taking money hand over fist from the government, sacking workers willy-nilly and leaving thousands of people out of a job. When it comes to travel insurance for a family of four, we're talking over $100 difference—$100 difference for one simple thing—because you can buy the travel insurance direct for around $136, whereas Qantas will charge you $230.

The other thing that they do, in a quick way to fool people, to leave people in the lurch, is to not allow you even a quarter of an hour to sit down and read 1,500 words. I know some of us in here think we're great speed readers, but, come on, let's be serious. That's the important thing here: we're seeing consumers being ripped off, being forced to pay above and beyond the quota, and not being given the opportunity or the chance to thoroughly understand what this means. Now we've got a minister who sits there and says, 'Look, I'm the great font of knowledge and fairness. I'll be the one who makes the decisions on exemptions.' This is not right and it's not fair. We know that the government will continue to do what they're doing at the moment—and that's always to make a headline that says they're going to be great and they're going to be helpful. But, when it comes to the detail, we find it is the average Australians—the families out there, the mums and dads in our communities—who are the ones being impacted.

Whether it's travel insurance or insurance relating to motor vehicles—I'm very passionate about my motor vehicles—there hasn't been a person, I think, who's ever come to me and said that they've been forced to buy repair cover, or wheel and tyre cover, and that it's always worked out well.' It never does. No-one gets the opportunity, when they're forced to do something straightaway, to sit down and read it—when they're purchasing something that sometimes is the second-biggest purchase they make in their life, outside of their family home.

What we need to do—and I think the royal commission brought this into place—is ensure that people are given proper opportunity to scrutinise things, to sit down and think them through and make sure that they're getting value for money. But the government wants to say: 'No, no. Let's just scrap that. We know best. We're the ones in charge. We're the ones who wrote the headline. We're the ones who put out the press release. You don't need to worry. All is good.'

When it comes to all being good, I go back to what I said about what's happening with the likes of Qantas, where we've seen thousands of workers being ripped off, losing their jobs, fighting to get back jobs that they already had, while the government keeps putting money into it—and I'm not even going to step onto Rex airlines, because we know that's pure pork-barrelling by the National Party.

The important thing here is: we've got to make sure that protections are in place to look after consumers—the mums and dads out there in the street who are working hard and trying to survive. It's tough enough as it is during this Morrison recession. But these add-on travel insurance products have been shown to be nothing more than poor value, and we need to address this by supporting the amendment by the member for Kingsford Smith.

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