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

We've just had 10 minutes of dares, diversion, distractions; everything but him, the Assistant Treasurer, coming to the dispatch box and saying 'Yes, we've had six months and one day in office and we could have done more; we should have done more; we've let the Australian people down.' He talked about honesty in his closing remarks. If he were honest with the Australian people he would admit that they haven't fulfilled the promises they made prior to the May 21 election in the first six months.

I appreciate that six months is not long, but he did mention that there is another budget next May. We'll give those opposite until next May to get things right. But the Australian public won't. They expect a reduction in power prices before Christmas. They were told 97 times they were going to get power bills that were less than the previous bills they had to pay. Power bills actually came down when we were in government. Now they are just going up and up and up. I get many small businesses in my regional community who complain to me, as do households, about the fact they cannot afford power prices.

We heard from the Assistant Treasurer about aged care and how people in the aged care system should be paid more. None of us would deny the aged care workers, those wonderful people, a pay increase. But when you have a Labor government promising unfairly that they're going to put in this 24-hour nursing in aged care centres—of course we need the proper care and attention, but that will send some of those regional and particularly remote aged care centres to the wall if they have to provide a level of care that is just beyond the levels of staffing that they could possibly do. And yes, of course we want to have trained, qualified people on call 24 hours a day, but the expectation Labor has given to the sector and to those people who want their loved ones to have the best in their twilight years is beyond the actual capability of some of those aged care centres, especially in remote Australia, to be able to deliver.

We heard from him about properly funding our defence force. We all remember the last time Labor were in power and defence spending dropped below two per cent of GDP for the first time since 1938. And we all know what happened in 1939.

So they talk a big game and they talk up all of the things they are going to do. We heard just prior to the election, on 17 May in fact, the present Treasurer, the member for Rankin, saying we want to show up every day and take responsibility not just for the good things but difficult things as well. The same present Treasurer during the height of COVID said this government—when we were in government—will be tested and this will be the rank on which they will be scored by whether they keep jobs going, the unemployment rate. Well, with JobKeeper we saved 700,000 jobs. In fact 1.1 million employment opportunities were created since the pandemic hit. I remember being in those meetings when Professor Brendan Murphy, the Chief Medical Officer, advised those running the government that we could potentially lose tens of thousands of people in a few weeks. They were dire times.

Yet we hear those opposite talking about a trillion dollars worth of debt. It's not a trillion dollars; it's nowhere near a trillion dollars. They say 'What do we get for the debt that we are now in?' I'll tell you what we got for the debt that we are now in: we got Australians saved. We had their lives and livelihoods protected. That's what we did. We ensured that potentially 50,000 to 55,000 Australians are alive today who otherwise would not be but for the policies that we put in place. We kept the doors of business open. We kept the wheels of the economy turning, because that's what a responsible government does. For those who come in now saying 'What do we get for a trillion dollars worth of debt?' the answer is A. It's not a trillion dollars; and B. we kept Australians alive. Isn't that the first task of government: to protect Australians' lives? That's what we did. I'm proud that we did and I'm proud of the legacy that we managed.

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