James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just remind those who are listening at home that we're currently debating a matter of public importance that was moved by my good friend Senator Dean Smith from Western Australia. That matter is that the No. 1 current pressure on Australians' wellness is the cost of living, but the Albanese Labor government is spending its time writing out-of-date and misleading reports rather than making the hard decisions to lower inflation faster, which is what really matters to millions of Australians. I don't know what planet the Labor Party is on, but it's certainly not planet Earth. I suppose we shouldn't expect anything less from a Treasurer who is the economic love child of Wayne Swan and Paul Keating, who are two of the world's worst finance ministers or Treasurers, when you look at their records. Our Treasurer in Australia is Dr Jim Chalmers. I'm not knocking someone who has a PhD, but I certainly question their lucidity, because, when they choose to do a PhD on Paul Keating, you wonder whether medication should be lowered or increased in that particular instance. We've got a Treasurer, a Labor Party and a government in Australia who aren't dealing with the cost of living.

Apart from these interesting reports that they pop out, with their nice fonts and things like that, what they are talking about, day in and day out, is something called the Voice. They're talking about something that is going to divide Australians. They're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a referendum to try and divide Australians. They will spend hundreds of millions of dollars—not of their money but of taxpayers' money—on a proposal that is risky and unknown, which will be permanent and divisive. We've found out this week through questions in question time in both the Senate and in the House of Representatives that not only is the government not dealing with the No. 1 issue impacting upon Australians—that is, the cost of living—but that the Voice is going to lead down a track. It's going to lead to something called a treaty. What we found out in question time today was that the ministers who were asked questions about the treaty failed to rule out a treaty, failed to rule out reparations, failed to rule out what percentage of GDP would be set. So we're going to talk about the cost of living, but what's also going to cost Australians is if we have a divisive referendum on the Voice and then we have a treaty that will then lead down the track to a financial settlement that is going to cost Australians even more.

I've just spent the last few weeks driving around regional, remote and rural Queensland, and the No. 1 issue in Queensland is the cost of living and all the associated parts of it, that people have been whacked by the 11 interest rate rises that have happened under this Labor government. The people are being whacked by insurance premium rises. The people are being whacked by a rising inflation rate that hits them constantly, and yet we have a Labor party from a different planet, who don't understand this and are focused on these woke issues that they think will lead Australia down some path to utopia, when, in fact, what Australians want from their governments are practical measures to help to assist them in dealing with this cost-of-living crisis, and it is a cost-of-living crisis. I would encourage Mr Albanese to visit Burketown in the Burke Shire. He hasn't been there because it's not in a marginal seat. He hasn't been there because it's probably hard for camera crews to get there, but Burketown and the associated Burke Shire and Doomadgee were wiped out by a terrible flood earlier this year. But no Labor prime minister's been there. I don't think any Labor cabinet minister's been there. The Labor Party has no interest in this because there aren't any camera crews. The parts of Queensland are being let down by this axis of Labor incompetence and Labor malfeasance, with Palaszczuk, who spends all her time on the red carpet joined by Anthony Albanese— (Time expired)