Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour and a privilege to be re-elected to the federal parliament for a fifth term, and I thank the people of the Riverina for bestowing upon me that great privilege. I will certainly not let you down. I've worked hard over four terms to ensure that the trust and the faith that you've placed in me is rewarded, and I will certainly do my very best, albeit in opposition. But you can still achieve things from opposition. I'm just glad that when I was the Deputy Prime Minister, for three and a bit years, my door was always open to every member of parliament. I've got a good relationship with most if not all members on the government benches and look forward to working with them and, of course, my colleagues on this side, to build a better Australia. At the end of the day, that's what we're all here to do. Sometimes we do it in a very bipartisan way, and sometimes not. But every member of this place, all 151 members of the House of Representatives are sent here by their communities to do a job. People in Australia want, need, expect and deserve those members they send to Canberra to do the job on their behalf. And I will earnestly and honestly represent them as best I can, as I've always done.

On election night, just before the election was called, I made this comment to the wonderful volunteers who served the National Party so well: 'I also want to thank tonight those many, many volunteers of the National Party, those yellow-shirted warriors who have stood out, in two weeks of pre-poll, in some circumstances from 8 am to 8 pm. They've handed out on cold cement, they've handed out on early mornings and chilly mornings, and they've handed out in the dark of night—and they've done it because they believe in the National Party. They believe in what the National Party represents and they know that the National Party delivers. And I'm very proud and very, very humbled by the fact that those National Party people always turn up and they are always behind me and they are always magnificent people. We have some people with health issues and other things, but they've still managed to find the time to turn up—for 12 hours today in some cases—and hand out for the National Party, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Not only that, at pre-poll they've also handed out across the 84 booths across the Riverina and Central West. We've had every single booth supported by National Party people handing out, and giving people that choice to maintain the National Party representation here in the Riverina. And I have to say, as the member for Riverina now going into a fifth term, I'm very humbled by the fact that I have people who are so keen, so dedicated and so committed to the National Party cause. And that is one of the reasons why we keep getting re-elected. But we also keep getting re-elected because people believe in the National Party.'

I mentioned the National Party there a lot. But also I do want to thank the other candidates who stood and represented their parties, and in one case an Independent, for putting their hands up too, because it takes courage to put your hand up for election. It takes courage to put your name on a ballot paper. And this is what democracy is about. It is about giving people choice. I'm just glad that the people of the Riverina have reaffirmed their faith in me and, as I say, I will do the very best job for them. I also want to thank my family, my wife Catherine, my wife of almost 36 years, for being alongside me for all of those 36 years, including the 12 years I've been a member for parliament, and to thank our children, Georgina—who's about to get married in a couple of months time—Alexander and Nicholas for also being very supportive. You cannot do this job unless you have backing of your loved ones. I'm very thankful and grateful for the support they have always shown me.

The government that did not win office at the May election was, I believe, a good government. I know it was a good government. And we did a lot of good things for Australia and Australians. Yes, the electorates across the nation decided on something else. They went for the Labor Party, and good luck to the Labor Party. That is democracy. We decide our elections without violence and without people getting hurt, and that has to be seen as a good thing. But I note that the media has been in a rush to gush about the new government. I wish the Prime Minister well in his role. He's been a long time in the waiting to fulfil this lifelong ambition he has had to be in the Lodge. I do hope in one sense that he succeeds, because his success means Australia's success and, certainly, we want our nation to succeed. No matter what partisan beliefs we have, we do want our nation to succeed.

But we also want to make sure that the government does what it says it's going to do. We also want to make sure that the legacy of the last government is not trashed by the Labor Party, who have shown a wont to talk about the trillion dollars of debt. The debt that has been incurred enabled the nation to keep people safe, to keep people alive and to keep people in jobs in the worst pandemic in 100 years. It was a global pandemic. This wasn't just an Australian thing. This wasn't just something that had just occurred in our area of the globe, in our corner of the world. This was something which beset the whole world.

I was at those meetings with the then Treasurer, the former member for Kooyong—and I'm so, so sad that he is no longer in the parliament—the then Prime Minister and the then health minister, who did such an outstanding job. I wish the previous member for Flinders all the very best in his future endeavours. There was also the then defence minister, now opposition leader, the then foreign affairs minister, Senator Marise Payne and others from time to time. Those meetings were to work out a framework around what we were going to do when the Chief Medical Officer and the chief of defence looked across at us from around that table with the National Security Committee and spelled out the disaster that COVID-19 had the potential to be. I well remember the rapid action of the then Prime Minister, the member for Cook, to close the borders to China. I well remember the swift action that we all took to ensure that our nation was kept safe.

These were not easy times. Whilst now we're still having COVID deaths, you don't see them reported on the news on a nightly basis. Let's remember that we were reporting on cases, not deaths, and only a handful of them in those early stages when other nations with very good health systems were reporting on deaths. Let's take the United States of America, for example, where they were burying people in almost mass graves on Manhattan island. They were going to all sorts of measures. The morgues in Italy, another country with a good health system, were filled to overflowing. They were using churches and there were coffins stacked upon one another because they couldn't bury the people who were dying from COVID quickly enough.

Those images, which were being beamed into living rooms across Australia and across the world, made for some panic. We all remember how everybody thought they needed 10 rolls of toilet paper every time they went to the toilet. We remember how people were reacting. I won't tell you I'm a folder, not a scruncher! The parliament needed to know that, didn't it? But, indeed, these were panicked times. People were hoarding food. People were going to extraordinary lengths. I can remember well how a fire-ravaged supermarket at Batlow was stripped bare by people on a bus who turned up and took every single item on the shelves. Legislation had to be put in place. The same happened at Parkes, but the Batlow community had been ravaged by fire, which made it worse. We had to put emergency legislation in place to stop those food stores and vital protein from leaving our shores.

This was something that we hadn't seen in 100 years. Action needed to be taken. The Treasurer formed JobKeeper. JobKeeper saved at least millions of jobs. There's no question how many businesses it saved. How many businesses would now have their doors shut and employees out on the street but for that JobKeeper assistance which was provided? The figure is 700,000 jobs saved through that measure alone, let alone the indirect jobs which also would have doubtlessly gone to hundreds of thousands, hence my 'millions' figure. This was a time of crisis, and the government acted responsibly, it acted quickly and it acted practically. It saved jobs and saved people's lives and livelihoods.

I know there was a lot of criticism at the time of the number of people in aged care who were lost, yet now the number of deaths in aged care would far exceed those which occurred at that heightened time of crisis. I know how much criticism there was of the supposed slow rollout of the vaccines. That's not the case. The vaccines were on order, but it was felt at the time that Europe, where the vaccines were made, wanted to keep their own store of the manufactured vaccines because people were dying in Europe in the order of tens of thousands each week. We felt as a government that that was probably necessary—that they needed them at the time perhaps more than Australia did, given the fact that our case rates—not our death rates but our case rates—were being controlled.

Of course, we've come a long way since 1 March 2020, when James Kwan was the first who died from COVID. We've now lost many thousands of people, 14,500, but nowhere near the order of what was first being suggested—upwards of 50,000 to 55,000. There were food queues and jobless queues in the order of what we saw when the Spanish flu occurred after World War I, when the soldiers started coming back in 1919 and 1920. We thought we were going to go down the same sorry path in 2020 and 2021, but we didn't, because of the Morrison government's quick action to save people—to protect their jobs and to save their lives.

Some of the things that we did were quite extraordinary. There was a record high number of trade apprentices—220,000—and one in four homes had rooftop solar. I know those opposite decry our climate action policies, but we had one in four homes with rooftop solar—the highest rate in the world. We had a 20 per cent reduction in emissions since 2005. So we were not only meeting but beating the targets and the promises that we made in Paris all those years ago. We not only met them but beat them. That is what a responsible government does. But we did that without costing tens of thousands of jobs in the mining industry and without putting power prices for farmers up, far in excess of what they would expect to be able to do. Our farmers are the world's best environmentalists. I see the member for Parkes in the chamber supporting my remarks, and I'm sure that, when he decides that his parliamentary career is over, he will return to the farm at Warialda and do a darn good job, just like every other farmer in this nation. We thank him and every other farmer for growing the world's best food and fibre and for being the world's best environmentalists, because they are.

When it comes to what we did and our response to COVID-19, I have to say that the world-recognised Johns Hopkins GHS index ranked us No. 2. Australia was ranked No. 2 in the world for pandemic preparedness. That is something that we should be proud of. That is something we should be extolling. Every member of this place should say, 'I had a hand in doing that,' but what we hear from those opposite all too often is the old line from the talking points about a trillion dollars worth of Liberal debt. Well, that's not true. What we did was make sure that we kept people's jobs, and we made sure that we ensured people's lives. I was very proud to be a member of those important meetings as Deputy Prime Minister of this country and to help make some of those decisions which saved people's lives and saved people's jobs.

More than that, we had more than half a million people on the NDIS. Now, when we came to government nine years ago—yes, I will give Julia Gillard and the Labor government credit for the NDIS, but did they put a cent towards it? No. Did we? Yes. We not only backed it but also made sure Australia's most vulnerable were being looked after, because that's what a responsible coalition government does.

Debate interrupted.

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