Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Rear-vision-mirror-itis is an affliction of this government, sadly. Since the election, I've not heard a contribution made by a government speaker that is purely about looking forward and how they're going to solve problems, without referring to the past. It's as if they have no control over anything and will therefore take no responsibility for anything. To that end, the coalition does support Senator Babet's motion in general terms, because it is right to say that the current government and their terrible approach to budget management, their lack of fiscal restraint, are causing huge problems in our nation, particularly for households and businesses.

I will point out that in the second paragraph Senator Babet refers to an example of a project: 'such as Snowy 2.0'. That's one we don't agree with, of course; we do support that project. But you only have to look a little bit further to see some of the terrible things the government are doing in terms of wasteful spending. We just spent nearly half a billion dollars on a divisive referendum. That's not a good use of taxpayers' money. We told this parliament that it didn't need to happen, but it was money spent all the same. What do we think that did to the economy and to inflation? What kind of impact do we think $1 billion on extra public servants is going to be having on the economy? Churning more money into jobs in this city is not going to ease inflationary pressures.

It was interesting to hear one of the Labor speakers earlier on, Senator Payman, mention that the government can walk and chew gum. Well, clearly they're walking in circles, because, frankly, nothing is getting better. The cost of living is going up, but we keep hearing that they've got it under control. Thank goodness there's this Labor government in charge now, making lives better and easier for all Australians! I hope Senator Payman gets out and about and understands from her community exactly what is going on, because I don't think there's a single person that's telling her or any of her colleagues that the world is a better place since the election.

We copped a lot of stick at the last election for saying it wouldn't be easy under—the surname of the Prime Minister—Mr Albanese, and we were right. Power prices have gone up. Mortgage repayments have gone up. The cost of insurance has gone up. And the government continue to plough money into measures that will have an inflationary impact, because they are economically illiterate as a government. They have been every time they have been in power, and the impact on Australian households and business is always the same. The people that pay the bill at the end of the day are the people of Australia. It's the taxpayers who struggle to pay their power bills, who struggle to pay their mortgage repayments, who struggle to put fuel in the car to get their kids to school. They miss out because of Labor decisions and sometimes, dreadfully, Labor-Greens decisions. We support the motion, with the exception, as I said before, of the reference to the Snowy 2.0 project, because we believe that is a good one.