Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I encourage the former speaker, the member for Sturt, to encourage the passage of that legislation through the Senate. I know there are a lot of film production companies that are going to go to the wall if there's not a quick resolution of that, and there are some very commonsense amendments around. I encourage him to continue to see the passage of the bill through both places.

We're living through a once-in-a-century global pandemic. It's causing the greatest amount of inequality that we've seen in this country. But, instead of improving the lives of Australians, those opposite have indeed been making things much worse. One example is housing affordability. It's never been worse than it is right now. Many young Australians will never be able to afford a home, and it's this government's policies that have let that happen. This government doesn't do anything to help the next generation put a roof over their heads.

Under this tired old government, we've seen wages go backwards—not even staying the same, not even keeping up, but actually reversing. Wages have gone backwards by about $700 a year, while fuel prices have gone up $900 a year. The interests of hardworking everyday Aussies, who are feeling this, hard, in their back pockets, have never been of less interest to those opposite.

Those opposite stuffed up the vaccine rollout unimaginably all year, leading to months-long lockdowns for most of the country and causing unimaginable suffering to people and their businesses, but you won't ever hear them take any responsibility for that. They'll talk about the mental health challenges that are there but never connect it to the businesses that have gone to the wall because of lockdowns. Businesses have gone to the wall because JobKeeper was ripped away too soon, because the government were too focused on making sure that it went to the top end of town—to those businesses that actually had increasing profits during that period. But, when they started getting called out for giving taxpayers' money away to corporations that did not need it, then they withdrew it, leaving high and dry the small and medium businesses that did need it to keep their employees employed and to keep liquid, to keep operating their businesses.

At the same time, let's not forget that they're asking pensioners in their 90s to prove that they should be getting the pension and then threatening to put them on a cashless debit card. They're demanding that workers who may have been overpaid on JobSeeker or JobKeeper repay it, even if they're quite willing to do it if they just know what the situation is.

These things come up because of these continual lockdowns. Whose responsibility were the lockdowns? It was those opposite, the federal government, who failed to bring in dedicated, proper quarantine—a lot of people forget about that—and also failed in the vaccine rollout. They failed with the communications plan about the importance of getting vaccinated.

Now we've seen a disgusting situation where misinformation thrives not only among those opposite but with the Prime Minister himself. That's had real consequences in the Northern Territory, including in my electorate with the people that I support. Life-threatening, dangerous misinformation is flourishing, including in our remote communities in the Northern Territory. The government are doing nothing to stamp out the malicious spreaders of misinformation who are preying on these communities, and it is an absolute disgrace.

We know that those opposite have got no problem at all being profligate with taxpayers' money. It's a slur they like to throw at Labor, but we've had sports rorts, car park rorts, endless pork-barrelling of marginal seats—and their own seats, of course—and the million-dollar blind trust. The Australian public's faith in our democracy is at an all-time low, because that's how this Prime Minister wants it. The rorting has been outrageous. They don't want a national integrity commission, which says everything you need to know about this mob.

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