Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Make yourself comfy, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I'd like to tell you a story. It's a story about what I'm hearing around my electorate. At only 109 square kilometres, Moreton isn't a large electorate, but it is certainly a diverse electorate covering many suburbs. This month I've spent a lot of time in one of those leafy suburbs, Sherwood. Sherwood is part of what locals call 'the peninsula'. It's a green suburb with beautifully renovated Queenslanders, tidy gardens and some very impressive trees. Spending a month in a suburb means a lot of doorknocking and phone calls, and walking the streets and talking to as many locals as possible. Sure, we can take note of what national polling and the pundits tell us, but nothing gives us a better idea of what's going on politically than actually talking to real voters about what matters to them.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you might think it's strange that I'm telling you this story, because I tend to leave my doorknocking stories for TikTok—and, yes, I am cool enough to be on TikTok, apparently!—but this story is important, because it's a true story about Prime Minister Morrison in my electorate. Before the last election, when I held a community barbecue in Sherwood after the same process, people were lining up to tell me how angry they were about Labor's previous franking credits policy. I was there with the state member, Mark Bailey, and, I can tell you, he was pretty quick to palm off those cranky voters on to me, and rightly so. In 2021, Sherwood is a different story. People were lining up to give me their opinion about the Prime Minister. This time around all people wanted to talk about was how disappointed they were in the member for Cook. It wasn't so much that the Prime Minister keeps fobbing off responsibility to, basically, anyone who walks past his door but that no-one now believes a word he says. This might be good for me, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it's bad for our nation.

The thing is, unlike the Liberal and National parties, people in Sherwood care about our planet. They know that when the Prime Minister says that Australia is 'meeting and beating our climate targets' the only target we're actually meeting is the coalition's target to do nothing on climate. The Deputy Prime Minister made this clear at his coal-train train-wreck interview the other day, and this was crystallised during COP26. First, there were all those days of 'would they or wouldn't they commit to net zero'—and, remember, that was the absolute minimum that this nation could do. Then he went to COP26 and promised to do hardly anything, when the whole point of COP26 was to ramp up our action, not reinforce our inaction. And just when Australians thought the Morrison government had signed up to lifting its 2030 target—on the very same day—the government said it wouldn't agree to lifting that target. Confused? So is everyone in Sherwood. I get that trust in politicians is an issue, but the Prime Minister has taken this to the next level, especially when it comes to climate and establishing a federal ICAC.

See this speech in context