Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I spoke last month about Labor's Future Made in Australia Bill and likened it to Labor's use of the term 'made in Australia' to Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice in Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia. In the story, Mickey, as the incompetent apprentice, takes the magician's wand and inadvertently animates mops, buckets and furniture, in the process creating chaos in the wizard's tower. Labor's Mickey Mouse apprenticeship is on full display as described by the independent Reserve Bank of Australia, who called out the Labor government's spending as driving the rising cost of living. Australia is the only major economy where inflation is rising, not falling. Labor's homegrown inflation crisis, thanks to the $315 billion of spending, mostly on big government agenda items and equivalent to $30,000 more per household since they took office, is incredible. Household disposable income is heading south while in comparable economies household income is heading north.

My constituents in Mallee are feeling that cost-of-living pain acutely. We are living in Labor's homegrown cost-of-living crisis, and no amount of waving of wands, press conference trickery, TP tactics or pulling spending rabbits out of hats will convince the Australian public that this government has a fiscal clue what it is doing. Thankfully, Mickey's Fantasia mess is cleaned up when the wise wizard returns to set everything aright. The coalition's role has ever been thus in Australian politics: righting Labor economic chaos. My hope is sooner rather than later.

The coalition does not support this bill. We worked on a bipartisan position for over 18 months, but we are now at a point where, as the shadow Treasurer said this week, we need certainty and stability, not more change, at the Reserve Bank. The RBA is under unprecedented attack from this Albanese the Labor government and some of their proxies in the retired Labor operative space, as I will go into later. Even Gough Whitlam acknowledged the need for his ministers to fly economy, not first class, during a cost-of-living crisis his government faced. This government would make Gough Whitlam blush, such is the Albanese Labor government's bluster, trickery and gaslighting of Australians.

The coalition believes in the stable, credible and independent Reserve Bank of Australia. The independent RBA has hiked the cash rate 11 times on Labor's watch. The last cash rate hike was over 300 days ago, on 8 November 2023, yet Labor want to shift the blame to the RBA somehow smashing the economy. With Labor's abysmal track record of picking winners, the last thing we want is for Labor to stich up the Reserve Bank board. They've wrecked other government institutions with government appointments, and there is a huge cloud over Labor's connections with the disgraced CFMEU and questionable operatives in industry super. The coalition are very cautious about letting sack-and-stack Labor pick the team when Coach Chalmers is taking Australians to the bottom of the cost-of-living global ladder.

We on this side of the House have serious questions—

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