Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Senator Siewert's laughing about that. Do you say that's inaccurate? In my state of Queensland the Greens exist just to keep the Labor Party in power. In Senator Whish-Wilson's state of Tasmania they went even further than that; they joined in coalition government with them until the people of Tasmania got a bit sick of the Greens and the Labor Party and booted them all out. The Greens were lucky to win one seat at the last election in Tasmania.

Contrary to the import of this matter of public importance, the government is full of positivity and good things for the Australian people, like over a million jobs that have been created by coalition governments in less than five years. That's not bad; that's pretty positive. How could the Labor Party even suggest that was negative? There are 770,000 new jobs that have been created since September 2015, more than half of which are full-time. These are jobs that people didn't have under the Labor Party. Almost 340,000 new jobs were created in just the last 12 months. There has been record jobs growth.

There have been business tax cuts for small and medium-sized businesses, a very positive initiative of the Turnbull government. Strengthening small to medium-sized businesses means more jobs for our fellow Australians. Childcare reforms by the Turnbull government are benefiting a million families. Those new initiatives started in July, meaning more families are able to access affordable and reliable child care, enabling the parents to go to work. How positive is that? Where is the negativity that this particular motion seems to suggest?

We've turned the corner on energy prices. A lot of work has been done by Mr Frydenberg, the energy minister, in getting together this national energy policy, and it's a pity the Labor Party are so negative that apparently they want to keep the electricity prices high. I understand why that happens in Queensland. The electricity company in Queensland that generates and sells the power in Queensland—and gouges businesses and residents alike—is owned by the Queensland government. It makes huge profits, which the electricity company then just channels into the Queensland Labor government, a government that's bereft of any financial expertise. They try to stay afloat by gouging money out of electricity consumers through their wholly owned electricity company, so I can understand why Labor's opposed to the Turnbull government's initiatives to keep electricity affordable and reliable.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is yet another in a long list of free trade agreements that the Turnbull government has been able to achieve. They're not just international treaties that someone has signed and that's it; they actually mean something. I will just briefly mention two aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that are so appealing to me, and they are beef and sugar, which are major exports from up in North Queensland, where I come from. Regrettably, Senator Watt wouldn't know where that is. He knocked off the only Labor senator in North Queensland, and, of course, the Labor Party now have no senators north of Brisbane. Senator Watt got rid of the one they had, and I understand he's going to put in one of his Brisbane staffers and pretend they're the northern senator.

Senator Sterle interjecting—