Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My apologies. I go back to how we got here. In part it's through 10 years of neglect in our energy system, 10 years of denying any form of energy transition—hiding under a rock, as far away from the rest of the world as we can get—and doing nothing on housing. We have to change. Something has to change. That's why the country voted out the previous government. It's time to just move on. We have to take action. We have to do something meaningful. We actually have to change what we're doing and how we're doing it, to respond to the situation we find ourselves in.

The war in Ukraine, that hideous war in Ukraine, has driven a tsunami across our supply chain. It has meant enormous increases in the prices of goods. It has impacted energy prices, food prices—you name it. We've seen so many challenges, and they've all come home to roost. We have to do something. The Albanese Labor government has set forward a budget—a sensible, responsible and balanced budget—that brings down the amount of interest we're paying on the hideous debt that we were left. That helps us over the long term. I think this is one of the issues that we're not really seeing come through here. The structural changes that we have made in this budget will make a fundamental difference to the ability of this country to respond to the situation we're in, to lower our debt, to lower our interest payments, to lower inflation and to lift the people in this country who need assistance.

We have significant ideological differences, and I think it's time to acknowledge and accept that and realise that us doing something you don't like is okay. Ideologically, the coalition are very much about the survival of the fittest, the primacy of the wealthy and the free market. And that's fine. The coalition have that view, but we have a slightly different view.