Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say that the parliament and the public will be very disappointed with the first major speech from the new Leader of the Opposition in a debate with a title that promised so much more. It was a title that said that this matter of public importance was going to be about the government’s failure to provide leadership and deal with the great challenges of our nation. The new Leader of the Opposition, who wants to govern this country and who can speak in this debate for 15 minutes, did not mention infrastructure, health, education, broadband or climate change. How many issues are there that this new leader is going to address?

I do not deny that it is important to talk about the economy. With the background of the Leader of the Opposition, that is an important thing for us to engage on. That is why the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the Minister for Finance and others have been out there discussing the importance of our having a strong economy and of making sure that we are protected as much as possible from the international uncertainty. But what the Leader of the Opposition did not get to at all was why people want to worry about the economy. You know why people want to worry about the economy? They want it to be strong enough to keep people in jobs, to make sure that they can live productive lives and have enough money to be able to fund their healthcare needs, their education needs and their other needs. What we have seen, unfortunately, from the Leader of the Opposition is this determination to focus on such a narrow range of issues. In his first major speech as the Leader of the Opposition in this parliament, he chose not to deal with any issues, bar one, that actually have an immediate impact on the community. I think it was a strange choice.

The Leader of the Opposition wants to continue with the issue of pensioners, following the toing and froing that occurred under the previous Leader of the Opposition—and that is fair enough. But I think there will be a lot of people in the community who will say, ‘If a new Leader of the Opposition has 15 minutes to talk about a topic of his choice, which is the great challenges facing our nation, and does not mention what we might need to do in education, health, infrastructure and even climate change—a topic for which we know the Leader of the Opposition has some fondness, given his previous job—

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