Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday, Senator Cash told us that Peter Dutton will take 'exactly the same attitude as President Trump' if he gets to be PM. What a chilling prospect. Donald Trump has appointed Nazi-saluting billionaire Elon Musk to take a hatchet to public services. He started by shutting down, with immediate effect, the US agency for international aid. I've had development experts in my office today telling me that this means kids in Timor aren't getting breakfast and women across the Pacific have lost access to reproductive health care. That's Trump, that's DOGE and that's Musk at work.

What does a Dutton government offer? The same attitude and 36,000 jobs gone out of the public sector. But he doesn't say who, he doesn't say what and he doesn't say that he will instead direct billions of public dollars in a massive stream of profits to his big corporate mates, the consultants and the labour-hire companies, at three times the cost, dripping with conflicts of interest. Instead of a climate department, we'll have the big four writing climate policy while servicing the world's biggest fossil fuel producers. We've already seen it—we spent two years criticising it in the Senate—and the coalition want to bring it back in Trump's image. To coalition cuts in Trump's image, we say no. There's no place for it. There's no place for giving public resources to the billionaires and the big corporations. (Time expired)