Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If politics is the battle of ideas then this MPI should be renamed 'touching the void', because I swear to you the Labor Party have never found an idea that they won't run away from. They have completely, absolutely and abjectly given up on engaging this government and the Australian public on the things that matter. This MPI feels like something that was designed by an evil genius without any evil and certainly with no genius. If we are to take the member for Corangamite, the previous speaker, at her word and blame Scott Morrison for the lockdowns then we should thank him for the freedoms that we are all about to enjoy. The one thing he will not, however, ever take responsibility for is the haircut of the member for Isaacs. That is probably somewhere that he can't go.

This MPI is as scattered as confetti. It has no purpose. It achieves and seeks to hold no-one to account and only allow those opposite to bring forward nothing but a grab bag of complaints, whinges and whines while hiding from the fact that they present to the Australian people no alternative. It is Monty Python-esque in its comedic errors—'What did the Romans ever do for us?' The aqueducts, sanitation, education, wine and all those sorts of things. Someone has been watching too much Life of Brian.

When we get to questions concerning Australians under the age of 40—things like housing affordability—those opposite have nothing to say. Why do they have nothing to say? Because they have no ideas to offer. We have the situation where house prices in Australia have increased by 16 times since the 1990s and wages have increased only four times. If not for the policies of this government, such as HomeMaker, which has led to an absolute surge in building approvals and buildings for Australians and first home buyers, this problem would be acutely worse. According to the New South Wales government, there is an undersupply of 100,000 homes in Sydney. You wouldn't know that from listening to those opposite, because they don't care about Australians under the age of 40. They don't care about their issues, because they don't meet them in the boardrooms of industry super. You only meet them out on the streets, where people care about getting on with their lives. Those opposite have never met working-class Australians, because they are now fully and completely paid-up members of industry super. Ordinary Australians, those people under 40, have a choice between saving for their home or listening to the legislation of those opposite, where they forcibly remove 10 per cent of their incomes to give to the trillion-dollar industry super sector that donates so much to the Australian Labor Party.

They're not about organised labour anymore—and I acknowledge the former president of the ACTU over there—they're actually about organised capital. I wonder what the view of the former president of the ACTU is on the Finance Sector Union this week suing Cbus for trying to take money from workers. I haven't heard a single peep from those opposite about workers being ripped off by industry super. They have the gall to come into this chamber and accuse us of inaction, while they will not raise a finger, they will not raise a hand in support of working-class Australians who are trying to buy their own home, who are trying to get ahead. They only offer more money to their donors in the form of increased superannuation payments. They only offer them higher taxes. I quote Senator Gallagher, from the other place, who on Sunday confirmed that they're looking at a carbon tax. The shadow Treasurer has a ready said, yes, they'll be taxing different entities, more money. The one thing we can guarantee from Labor is that they will tax you more, they will take away your hope and they will give you no reason to work harder to build something for the future.

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