Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Menzies for his kind words about the class of 2022, but I am going to vigorously disagree with him. When we talk about power and prosperity, the Labor Party is fundamentally about bringing power to the people, power to the workers and power to our communities. One of the things that we did within the first two weeks of being elected was back minimum wage workers. You talk about prosperity, but I'm talking about prosperity for those that were working night and day during the pandemic—those who deserved our respect. Guess who had their back? Labor did. We had their back.

The reason why I'm on this side of the House is I want all Australians to succeed. I want to be very intentional with the way that we do that, and, the truth is, we have been doing this day in, day out. When we came into office, inflation had a six in front of it. Now inflation has a two in front of it. We've been working consistently and deliberately, and we've been fine tuning, and we are on the right track. It's fascinating because I remember that decade under the coalition and being used to not getting a pay rise, but I didn't realise that this was a deliberate design feature of the coalition policy. We are in a time where households are absolutely doing it tough, but the thing that Australia has managed to do is get inflation down and have record levels of employment across the country.

One of the ways that you can deliver prosperity is people being in a job, and I think that our Assistant Treasurer and Treasurer have been doing a very intentional job. It's because we care about people. Talking about where we could be going, if the opposition were to be elected we would be back to rising inflation. We'd be back to keeping wages deliberately low. We'd be back into an aged-care crisis. Bulk-billing would be in freefall. We'd be going back to child care being out of reach, forcing parents, especially women, to choose between work and caring for their kids. We'd be back to chasing manufacturing offshore. We'd be back to deficits as far as the eye can see.

I was thinking about numbers earlier today and I thought about the number two. What was the number of surpluses we delivered? Two! How many times did the opposition leader do a press conference? Two! I just find that mind-boggling. We delivered something that the coalition could not do in nine years. What do they have to show from a 'two' perspective? The opposition leader rocked up to a press conference twice! We can't wait for the election campaign. That's going to be a pressure cooker environment, and Australians and Western Australians are going to see his true colours. You can try to be controlled inside the House; this is a place where there are creatures that have developed here. But we and the public will see the true colours of the opposition leader and the opposition. There's a saying that I heard: 'What's Dutts going to cut?' Who knows? Is it veterans' affairs? Is it Medicare? Is it access to child care? Is it women's equality? Who knows. We're going to be back to chaos and conflict on climate change.

I'm going to say I don't think that it will be back to secret ministries. I don't have that vibe from the opposition leader, but, you know, who knows—right? Who knows? The thing I would say is that, at this election, we have a choice. I think we have been on the right track, and we will continue to work hard every day to deliver real results for households.

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