Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The mother of whom the Leader of the Opposition speaks knows, as does every Australian, that energy bills will always be higher under a Labor government. Energy will always be unreliable under a Labor government because the Labor Party does not understand the engineering or the economics required to deliver sensible, rational energy policy. We don't have to speculate or theorise about it. Labor has proved its incompetence in the energy sector again and again, more so in South Australia than anywhere else, where we've seen the most expensive and the least reliable electricity in Australia—a tribute to the triumph in the Labor Party's pantheon of ideology and idiocy. They aren't even competent in their ideology. If they wanted to have a state full of windmills, they could at least have provided the backup and the storage. But no, they didn't do that. They just assumed, I suppose, that the wind would always blow, and that they could literally blow up a coal-fired power station and rely, more in hope than expectation, on a long extension cord to the Latrobe Valley in Victoria.

The Labor Party have failed Australia on energy and they have failed on economics. My government is delivering on economic leadership: 371,500 jobs created over the last 12 months, 85 per cent of them full-time. There hasn't been a longer run of jobs growth in 23 years. Jobs growth is the highest it's been since 2008 and is now faster than in any G7 economy. The participation rate is at five-year highs. Over the last two years, there have been 521,700 more Australians in jobs, and, since we were first elected four years ago, 825,500 jobs have been created. 'Jobs and growth' is not just a slogan; it is an outcome. It is an outcome delivering on jobs and growth. For all of the rhetoric and politics from the Leader of the Opposition, he can't defy the facts for much longer. Australians know that we are getting on with the job, we are leading and we are seeing jobs growth unparalleled for 23 years. That is the commitment of our economic leadership.

See this speech in context