Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on how the government is getting on with the job of delivering its plan for a stronger and more secure Australia?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lindsay for her question and I commend her on her maiden speech to the parliament today and to all her family and other supporters who are joining us in the parliament. The government is getting on with the job, as we were elected to do, to secure Australia's future, to keep our economy strong, to guarantee the essential services that Australians rely on, to keep Australians safe and to continue to bring Australians together to face the challenges that are ahead of us.

When we were last here, we passed into law—with no great assistance from those opposite—tax relief for millions of Australians, including 77,000 Australians living in the electorate of Lindsay who now have access to that legislated tax relief which the opposition leader was seeking to oppose right to the last moment, with 3.5 million Australians benefitting from that tax relief straightaway. On top of that, some 14,383 small businesses and family businesses in the electorate of Lindsay are also benefitting from the tax relief we are providing to those businesses. These policies, which enable people to keep more of what they own—something that is opposed by the Leader of the Opposition—are contributing to some of the strongest employment growth figures we have seen, at 2.6 per cent. There are 296,000 jobs that have been created in the last 12 months. Eighty per cent of those are full-time. That is the strongest full-time jobs growth we have seen in 12 years.

There is $100 billion being spent on infrastructure into the future, and I note that it's $25 billion more on infrastructure than was announced prior to last year's budget, when we first announced the Future Drought Fund. So there is $25 billion more going into infrastructure—which is more than six times the amount that Labor is trying to prevent us from putting into future drought resilience projects—that we are already spending on infrastructure. The congestion-busting components of that are going to relieve the congestion in our major metropolitan areas, particularly in the electorate of Lindsay, with $63 million for the Dunheved Road project, which is all about ensuring that Australians can get home sooner, they can get to work safer, and they can spend more time with their families as a result of those infrastructure projects.

We're building our relationships with the region, with our closest neighbours—and we welcome the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea here today, Prime Minister Marape. But it's not only here directly in our region; our work through the G20 and more broadly through the Indo-Pacific is setting up trading, economic and security opportunities all around the world. And we're keeping Australians safe. The temporary exclusion orders for those returning foreign fighters coming to Australia are needed to ensure that we can keep a close eye on those. That legislation should pass this parliament. (Time expired)