Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Well, if you're sitting at home at the moment around the kitchen table working out how you're going to pay bills, looking at your insurance premium which has gone up dramatically, looking at the rent bill, looking at the grocery bill—if you're looking at any aspect of expenditure in your household or, indeed, in your small business, you would've watched question time today and believed that this Prime Minister and this government were living in a parallel universe. This government is so far out of touch with where the Australian public is that it is deeply offensive. As day after day goes by, the Australian public realise that this Prime Minister has no solution for them, has no answer to their problems and is, in fact, the architect of the problems that have been created over the course of the last long 1,000 days.

What we have seen from this Prime Minister and from this government from the very start is an absolute abrogation of their key responsibilities. Their first responsibility is to keep Australians safe. What has happened since particularly 7 October 2023 is that our country has become less cohesive and less safe. That is the reality. There are thousands and thousands of people in the Jewish community today who know that our country, their community and their neighbourhood is less safe because of the inaction and the weak leadership of this Prime Minister. This Prime Minister has demonstrated that he is out of his depth. When those people went to the steps of the Sydney Opera House, they weren't condemned as they should've been by this Prime Minister. When those protests started on the steps of the Opera House, they spread to university campuses and they went on unabated for months and months on the streets of Melbourne and of Sydney. People knew no red lines whatsoever because the police were instructed by a weak Premier in Victoria and by the Premier and the police minister in New South Wales to hold up law and order and to keep peace but not to intervene and arrest people for committing serious crimes.

Australians have been horrified by what they've seen on their television screens in the last 24 hours, with those two healthcare workers and their disgraceful, deplorable comments. That is the face of what the people of the Jewish community have been experiencing for the last 15 months at their local shopping centres, when they go online, when they read emails and when they've been disenfranchised and disowned by people in their own communities. That is exactly the sort of vile filth and racism that these people have been experiencing in our country for the last 15 months.

It's given the Australian public a window into the way in which this Prime Minister conducts himself. This Prime Minister has made it his core business to prioritise policies that will win them the votes of Greens voters in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. That is what's driven this Prime Minister because that is where this Prime Minister sees political opportunity. It's not just in relation to issues around national security; it's also in relation to issues on the environment.

People in Western Australia—the powerhouse of this economy and of this nation—know that, if this Prime Minister is to be re-elected, he can only do so with the support of the Greens and the Green teals. If that is the case, mining will be on its knees overnight. The people of WA aren't stupid. The people of WA know that this bill—which is ironically called 'nature positive' but really is mining negative—is all about how it can frustrate mining. If we close down mining in Western Australia, we stop funding schools on the east coast. If we close down mining in WA—as the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Greens would do after the election—we won't fund infrastructure projects, including in North Queensland, as the member for Kennedy rightly pleaded only a few moments ago. If the Labor Party is re-elected, we know that the nature-positive, mining-negative bill will be reintroduced in its worst form as part of the construct between the Labor Party and the Greens. It will kill the economy, not just in WA, but across the nation.

It doesn't stop with just national security, social cohesion and the environment. It also goes to what we've seen in the government's decisions on salmon farming. The economy and the environment in Tasmania will be adversely affected. Those workers in Tasmania will be adversely affected by the decision that the government's taken to close down the salmon industry in Tasmania. Why would they do that, when it's a central part of the economy, the economic life and the social life of those living in Tasmania? It's because the Prime Minister is again seeking to appeal to voters who would otherwise be voting for the Greens in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne. This Prime Minister has decided to put, as his first priority, the interests of Greens voters in Sydney and Melbourne, and he has hung the people in suburbs and regional and remote areas of the country out to dry. That's exactly what has happened under this Prime Minister's watch.

When we speak about 1,000 long days of this Prime Minister's reign—it feels like 10,000, first of all—we consider the impact has been negative on so many families, with so many people struggling to pay their mortgages after interest rates have increased 12 times. Interest rates have already gone down in the United States and the United Kingdom, in Canada and in New Zealand, but they haven't gone down here yet. I hope and pray they go down next week to provide some relief to mortgage holders.

It's not just households. There are 27,000 small businesses who have gone bankrupt under this Prime Minister's watch—a record high. There are manufacturing workers in this country with very few prospects of a future under this Prime Minister, particularly after the election in a minority government, because there has been a threefold increase in the number of manufacturing businesses which have closed over the course of the last two-and-a-half years. Have a look at what has happened in the area of health. When people go to their doctors, they know there's no bulk-billing available. When I was health minister the bulk-billing rate was at 84 per cent; today it's at 77 per cent and heading south. Of those 27,000 small businesses which closed under the Prime Minister's watch, 272 of them have been doctors surgeries—a record number of closures of doctors surgeries under the Albanese government's watch. That is an outrage. We need to provide support to aging Australians. We need to provide support to those mothers going through maternity services. We need to provide support to every Australian who needs a doctor at the time they need that doctor, not to make them wait for two weeks to get in to see a bulk-billing practice.

We've promised $400 million to train more doctors and to get more doctors into the system. We've promised to prioritise households and small businesses and businesses otherwise, because we want to grow the economy again. We want to get this country back on track. We want to fight the cost-of-living scourge that has been created by Labor. We want to make sure that we can help the health system grow, not shrink as it has under Labor. We want to make sure we can help all those businesses grow so they can employ more people, and help them with their priorities in life. We want to make sure that we can support every Australian to be the best they can be. We have outlined a vision for the Australian public. We have put forward a plan and will detail more of that as we go into the election. We will fight the cost-of-living pressures. We will build a stronger economy. We will cut government waste, which has fuelled inflation. We will back small business. We will deliver affordable and reliable energy. We will rebalance our migration program. We will fix the housing crisis. We will deliver quality health care. We will focus on practical action for Indigenous Australians. We will grow a stronger regional Australia. We will build strong and sustainable communities. We will keep Australians safe.

I promise the Australian people, as we go to the next election, that our government will be a government of strength, prepared to make the decisions to keep our country safe. My government will be a government which stands up for our interests on the world stage. We will do what it takes to rebuild the Australian economy, to clean up a Labor mess, exactly as John Howard and Peter Costello did in 1996. We won't shirk the responsibilities that sit on the shoulders of the government and a prime minister of the day. We will clean up this government's mess and we will get our country back on track.

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