Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

We have seen the sad and sorry sight today of a Treasurer and of a government that have truly lost touch with working Australian families. You just have to go back to 2005 to begin to understand why. When you go back to 2005 you discover that the Treasurer was so consumed with bitterness towards the Prime Minister of Australia that he gave a discussion and an interview to three journalists in which he talked about how he was going to destroy the Prime Minister: he was going to bring the Prime Minister down. So what we see is a Treasurer who takes his eye off the ball—a Treasurer who is so uninterested in the concerns of working Australian families that he wants to put his own ego, his own campaign for self-advancement, ahead of the concerns of the Australian public.

It is not just home ownership that this Treasurer, this Prime Minister and this government have lost touch with. It is also grocery prices and petrol prices—the ordinary day-to-day issues that Australian families are battling with. What is this Treasurer concerned with? He is more interested in his own job and in getting the Prime Minister’s job than he is about ensuring that the economic situation facing Australian families is his primary concern. It is not his primary concern. You just have to listen to the reaction of those opposite to realise that they are also not interested in the impact of increasing grocery prices, increasing petrol prices and increasing interest rates on Australian families. You just have to listen to the comments being made by those opposite to know that. Senator Ross Lightfoot thinks that working families should be grateful for what they have. They should be grateful after four increases in interest rates in the last three years. They should be grateful for the great economic management of the government. Those in the other place congratulate themselves on what a great government they were: ‘We had a great Prime Minister yesterday. We had a great Treasurer yesterday. We had a great Minister for Finance and Administration in here today.’ You just have to listen to them to hear how smug and out of touch they have all become on the other side. While Australian families have been struggling after their fifth interest rate increase—