David Van (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's no need to mention my good friends across the chamber, other than to say that they've been absolutely silent on the devastation that Premier Andrews has wrought in Victoria. How did he do it? He failed to lock down quarantine. When you have a pandemic, there are four things you can do. You can keep it out of your community, and you do that through quarantine. You can make sure that if it's in the community you can test for it and trace it. He's failed to do that. You can lock it down. Now, that's the one trick that he's found—the one-trick pony, Premier Andrews. That's all he's been able to do: lock down Victoria and crush jobs. Every day I get phone calls from businesses that have lost their livelihoods, that managed to get through stage 3, nearly six months of lockdown, and then stage 4 came along. We're at five weeks of stage 4 now, with a week to go, with still no plan to get Victoria out of it.

You guys are carrying on about a plan. Well, what about a plan to get Victoria going and start jobs again—to get those restaurants open, to get coffees going again, to get retail businesses open again? We hear nothing of that. This government believes in supporting business. We believe in building Australia's capability for the future. This government believes in removing red tape so that businesses, especially those small businesses that have been crushed by Premier Andrews in the state of Victoria, can grow and create jobs.

You ask about our plans. Well, our $300 billion of economic support package has kept this economy alive. When you compare it with all the economies across the world, ours comes out as one of the best: JobKeeper and JobSeeker, over $118 billion; cashflow support for small business, $32 billion; skills and apprenticeship programs, $2.8 billion; and infrastructure building, including $680 million for HomeBuilder grants. So there is plenty in there. Looking back to my first week in parliament, we delivered $167 billion in tax cuts. We've seen how that's supported business. Where were Labor on those? They finally came over to this side to vote for it, after being dragged there kicking and screaming. This shows that we're moving ahead with building a stronger Australia. This is the biggest investment in emergency economic relief by any Australian government and represents approximately 15 per cent of Australia's GDP. Even today in this place the government is trying to move legislation to ensure that big business follows government's lead in paying suppliers on time or paying interest if they don't.

Unlike Labor's past, with their failed and deadly pink batts scheme and their rorted school hall spending, this government is focusing on what will build more jobs and a more-prosperous Australia. Unlike Labor's past, the coalition is committed to making the lives of small businesses easier, because we understand that they are the lifeblood of the economy. Labor occasionally discovers that small business exists, when it's politically expedient to do so, but at the last election Labor did not offer small businesses any policies to access more finance—nothing about cutting red tape, improving payment times or reducing taxes. In fact, the only thing Labor offered small business at the election were more taxes, more costs—and less business.