Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is up to the member for Barker to explain why it was responsible economic management to hand down a budget with a $78 billion deficit when inflation was running at six per cent. That is the record that they left us. We have been working assiduously over the last two years to bring the budget back into balance, and we have done that, banking over 90 per cent of new revenue to pay down the debt that they left us. And, because we have been able to pay down the debt that they left us, we are paying $80 billion less in interest rate payments. We have been able to manage the fiscals, and we have been able to bring the budget and the debt down.

If you're going to complain about the cost of living and put that in issue then you've got to have a plan to do something about it. Whenever we have brought propositions before the parliament to help Australians, they have opposed every single one of them. Whether they are the sensible, modest and moderate reforms that we've made to workplace relations laws to enable Australians to bargain more fairly and more evenly, particularly low-paid Australians; whether it's supporting applications for an increase in the minimum award wage; or whether it's ensuring that women and workers in highly feminised occupations get a decent pay rise—and I point to the aged-care pay rises that we worked with the unions and the employers to secure—right across the board we are ensuring that we have provided better pay and higher wage increases for Australians over the last two years than the deliberate design policy of those opposite, which was to see wages go backwards. They have opposed every single one of them. Consider the investment in skills and the investment in health. For the life of me, I cannot understand why any member of this place would want to vote against a proposition which saw pensioners and people doing it tough pay less for medicine, but they did. They opposed those propositions.

The third proposition that we're invited to accept from the member for Hume is that the answer to higher energy prices today is a nuclear power station that will be delivered in 2045. If you say it slowly and you say it like that, you're able to understand how bat-poop crazy that actually is: the answer to people's power bills and the pressure that they are feeling today is a nuclear power station that will not deliver one new watt of energy until 2045. When it's put like that, you can see what a crazy proposition it is. But then, when you unpick it and you understand the economics of what they're actually proposing, these things can't be delivered without massive taxpayer subsidies. We are talking about a $1,000 per year tax on every Australian household to deliver their nuclear fantasy. It's not a policy. It's not a plan. It's ideology dressed up as economics by the high priests of drongo economics. They know they can't deliver it. It will not deliver one new watt of energy, which is why they won't release the costings and why they won't be honest with the Australian people.

We are less than 12 months from the next election. Over the next 12 months, in the lead-up to the next election, we will have two competing plans for the future of Australia before the Australian people. One plan is about a future made in Australia. It's about Australians, Australian business and an Australian government which holds its head up high and says: 'We have the confidence to back Australian ingenuity and Australian resourcefulness to ensure that we maximise our natural advantages, whether they be in energy or in other areas of manufacturing and manufacturing capacity. We have the confidence to back Australians and to back Australia. We have a plan for a future made in Australia.' That is one of the competing propositions, that is the proposition of the Albanese Labor government. And that proposition will be put up against the proposition by the Leader of the Opposition, which is that the answer is a nuclear power plant and a $1,000 per household tax on every Australian household, with not one new watt of electricity to be delivered until 2045.

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