Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise here today and speak on this MPI, in which those opposite label the Prime Minister 'weak and incompetent'. When you think about it, we should be turning the tables and pointing the finger at them. If we look at the past decade, we see weakness and incompetence. The opposition, which was in government then, will go down in history as being one of the governments that illegally extracted money from the poorest of the poor, through robodebt. If you want to talk about incompetence, they were warned about robodebt, they were told about it, but they would not budge. They were quite happy to extract billions of dollars from everyday Australians illegally, as it was described by the judge. That's incompetence. That's absolute incompetence.

If you want to talk about what we're doing, from day one the Prime Minister's goal has been to ease cost-of-living pressures, to ease the hardship that Australians go through every day. When we debated in this place to increase wages, those opposite opposed it. We saw that. Every time we have brought legislation in this place to ease the cost of living, they've opposed it. Remember the electricity debate that we had towards the end of last year. They opposed it. When they left government, the budget was in a very weak position. We were in a deficit. Today we see the budget in a very strong position. That doesn't happen by chance. It happens by putting measures in place, and that's what this government and this Prime Minister have been doing.

We've strengthened Medicare. They took billions of dollars from our health system from 2013. They took out billions of dollars in every budget, and therefore there was pressure on our health system. The same people who caused a lot of the pain are now complaining about it, which is like someone lighting a fire and then running off and calling the fire brigade. That is what they are doing. As I said, they opposed minimum wages. We have created 155,000 new jobs, which means 155,000 new positions so that people will be able to work, have dignity and have a wage to put food on the table, pay their mortgages and live decently I'm very proud of the 15 per cent wage increase for our aged-care workers. They appreciate it, yet those on that side opposed it and will never appreciate it because it is within their DNA to oppose any betterment of workers' rights and any increase of wages.

During the decade they were in government, they demonstrated a complete disconnect from the everyday challenges of regular Australians, and repeated attempts to slash government funded paid parental leave is one of them. That is a sign of incompetence. Wanting to increase the price of essential medicines by a copayment of $5 per script is a direct hit on people's pockets and those that can least afford it. That is a complete disconnect from the electorate and incompetence. That was really a cowardly thing to do: you attacked the sickest people in our community and tried to extract money from them.

Changing the law to hide energy price hikes before an election shows they were putting their interests ahead of the interests of the people that they are supposed to represent. That is a clear sign of not only weakness but incompetence as well. When using words such as 'weak' and 'incompetence', we should be talking about the opposition leader and also all those on the other side of this chamber for their actions when they were in government, not our Prime Minister. It is concerning that those on the other side seem to be more interested in political gains than in standing up for Australians. When they had the opportunity to lead, their focus seemed to be on policies that set Australia up for failure, and now in opposition they seem determined to obstruct progress rather than contribute to the betterment of the country.

We can't deny that there is a housing crisis in Australia at the moment, but there was not one single policy on housing while they were in government. What we saw was nothing on housing. We are acting to deal with the problems with housing, and the policy that we put through this place recently will be proof of that. In their entire time in power they failed to take any meaningful action to address our housing issues. They had their chance, but they didn't answer, and when the Albanese government recently tried to deliver it—and we did—they opposed it at every step. (Time expired)

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