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

I'm going to start with these famous words: 'We will deliver a surplus in our budget each and every year we're in government.' That was said by Joe Hockey, that famous Treasurer of the Liberal government, who goaded the Australian automotive industry out of existence—and thousands and thousands of jobs with it. What we saw with that government when they were in was actually a tripling of the debt. It was headed for $1.2 trillion under their watch. We had the then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, come in here and say that there would be no cuts to SBS, no cuts to health and no cuts to education, and they tried the GP tax. All these were things that they did over nine years of neglect and darkness, which they seem to forget now. They seem to be absolutely ignorant of what they did when they were in government. They expect it to be fixed just like that.

We know that, when it comes to the cost of living, people are hurting. They are hurting because of a whole range of issues, but No. 1 was a deliberate strategy of the Liberal and National parties to drive down wages. There has never, ever been a wage case going forward to the Industrial Relations Commission or to Fair Work Australia—which is the place we go to now—in which those opposite have supported an increase for low-paid workers. They have done everything they can to make it harder for Australians who are doing it tough at the moment through things like child care.

We could talk about power prices and that, because we remember Captain Cayman himself, the member for Hume, coming in here and carrying on. Remember, he was going to carry his big stick—one of the 22 plans they had for power prices that they never, ever delivered. Well, that big stick turned out to be a bit of limp lettuce. It did nothing. In fact, during his time as energy minister, the thing he was most famous for was dodgy documents relating to Clover Moore. That was the extent of what they were aiming to do.

You have that mob over there, who still sit there and say, 'Oh, we've got to continue with developing coalmines.'

A government member: It's not a mob; there's three of them.

There's three of them—yes, three of them. It's probably the brains trust! This is the day that we talk about a matter of public importance. Well, let's have a look. We know that renewable energy is the cleanest and cheapest form of energy. Once you've got those systems up and running, you actually have free energy that can come out of that. We also hear the misnomer from those opposite about how the wind doesn't blow all the time and solar doesn't work at night. The irony is that it was one of their resources ministers, the one that the member for Cook had to shadow because he was going that badly—old Scomo decided to pop in and fill in that position himself at the same time; you know, he's interested—

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