Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Every time the hapless PM says, 'How good is Australia?' we should remember that this is the bloke who bailed to Hawaii when the country was burning. Like the marketing campaign asked, Australians asked, 'Where the bloody hell are you?' Great leaders are there in times of need. Over this summer Australians needed leadership, but we got nothing. We got a couple of snaps from Waikiki while the Blue Mountains burned. The PM was focused on his own hide, not those of the people he is tasked to represent.

This is a government led by an ad man without a plan. Australians every day are feeling the heat. Australia was once a nation that punched above its weight, a nation that prided itself on the ability to lead the world. Now we're declining in global rankings across the board. Australia's falling rankings signify a rotting government. This is a government more obsessed with looking out for its mates than it is about stopping declines in standards. Each year it goes on the further and further we fall behind. Let's look at some facts.

The coalition have slashed $4 billion from the R&D tax incentive, contributing to a brain drain in this country. We're now ranked 127th, below that of Slovenia and Greece. Renewable energy investment is down. Investment in renewable energy has dropped 60 per cent in the past year alone. We are ranked 15th in the world for sustainable energy, equal last amongst wealthy countries. We join Chile and Argentina as the only OECD countries without a price on carbon or pollution in any form.

Childcare costs are skyrocketing. Since the coalition took power in 2013 childcare fees have increased around 34 per cent. That means Australians are paying more than $14,000 a year under the Liberals compared to about $11,000 under Labor.

We see school performance declining under the coalition. Once ranked in the top five of the best-performing schools, Australia now ranks 16th. This means Aussie kids are 3½ years behind Chinese kids in maths education. They're also a full year behind from where they were in science achievements in 2007.

The cost of sending your kids to school is too high for parents. The cost of secondary education increased by 125 per cent from 2010, under Labor, to 2019, under this Prime Minister. The cost of educating a child in government schools from K to 12 is now $68,000. This figure climbs to $127,000 for Catholic schools and $298,000 for private schools.

Our gender gap is getting worse. Under Labor, in 2007 Australia sat in 17th place in terms of gender equality. In 2019 we fell to 44th out of 153 countries, a decline of 30 places. At this rate we'll be sitting with Saudi Arabia in about a decade.

Poverty is increasing under this government. In Australia in 2018 there were three million people living below the poverty line. One in eight adults and more than one in six children are living in poverty. Australia has the 16th-highest poverty ranking out of 34 of the wealthiest OECD countries, but we are the second-wealthiest country in the world.

The cost of medical care is getting too high for the average Australian. The cost of medical and hospital care has tripled in the last 20 years. This means some families are cutting corners to save money while forgoing emergency protection products, like life and health insurance. The average price of insurance itself has jumped by 118 per cent. Meanwhile Minister Hunt confirmed that insurance costs will rise by another 2.29 per cent this year.

Electricity prices have increased under this government. The ACCC found the electricity prices are now 20 per cent higher under the coalition in 2019 than they were under Labor. Under Labor, electricity prices were hovering at around $1,200; now they're in excess of $1,500 per family.

Spending billions on defence: the government is claiming about $90 billion over the next 30 years to build ships and submarines. But what we found last week was that the company building the ships has said they're not going to meet the 90 per cent local content rule that we were promised and instead try and meet 60 per cent, which they still refuse to put into contracts. Whatever happened to the country that designed and built and manufactured and sold and exported goods and inventions all around the world?

Australia can achieve great things. Two men, Mark Lidwill and Edgar Booth, both invented the electronic pacemaker in the twenties. Nowadays, over three million people have it worldwide. The famous Hills hoist, the most iconic Australian invention, was created by Lance Hill for his wife in 1945 when their backyard became too small for their clothes line. The ute was an Aussie invention, dating back to 1932 when a farmer requested Ford Australia to make a two-in-one car-truck—we know what happened to the automotive industry under this government. Lewis Bandt took that two-door Ford V8 Coupe and grafted the high-sided open utility to what we know as the ute today.

Another great Aussie invention was of course the electric drill. Arthur Arnot developed the 75 kilo electric drill, powered by a DC electric motor, to drill through rock and coal. The dual-flush toilet was developed by Australian Bruce Thompson as a way of saving water. It's estimated that around 32,000 litres of water are saved each year by Aussie households. Of course the black box flight recorder was invented by Australian scientist David Warren in the 1950s. In modern times, the black box is installed in every commercial flight around the world.

The incredible Cochlear implant was invented by Australian professor Graeme Clark in the seventies. These days around 350,000 people now have the ability to hear because of Professor Clark's work. The first inception of Google Maps was developed in Australia in the early 2000s called Where 2 Technologies. In 2004 it was bought by Google, and those Aussies helped develop the maps we use today.

In 1851, James Harrison from Geelong created a mechanical ice making machine—the first refrigerator. Wi-fi technologies are used by billions of people around the world today. A key part of that technology came from Aussie John O’Sullivan's research at the CSIRO in 1992. The ultrasound scanner that millions of pregnant women rely on was invented in 1976 by an Aussie firm called Ausonics. Nowadays millions of pregnant women rely on ultrasound technology as it's used in the diagnosis of medical problems.

Australians are rightly asking this: when did we go from a country whose government stood up for people, not stood on them? When did we become a country that had safety nets to stop people falling through the cracks to one where the government actually pushes people through the cracks, a country with the highest wealth inequity chasm in history? When did this government lose sight of the Aussie ethos of working together for the common good to one which focuses on greed and deception of taxpayer dollars? When did we become a country where wage theft is an acceptable practice? When did the government decide that people with disability and those with the least to give be the ones who carry the can for those with the most in their pockets? When did this government decide to force farmers off their land so global mining giants can pillage the land beneath them and to frown upon those working in blue-collar jobs? When did this government decide to offer more protection for those who steal workers' wages than it does for the victims themselves? When did we become a country whose government is watching wages stagnate and costs go up when more and more Aussies are in housing stress and when families are now paying on average 46 per cent of their wages on a mortgage compared to that of seven years ago? I'll tell you when. It was on May 2019 with the re-election of a government through a deceptive campaign, a government which has done nothing to help everyday Australians, a government that when people needed leadership the PM had taken off overseas and now keeps blaming the opposition. Australians have many things to be proud of. This current government is not one of them. It's people in communities like ours out in the outer suburbs and the rural fringes that are suffering the most.

There's been no investment in major infrastructure for seven years under this government—we can't get a single road project. There's a massive amount of population moving out to the north of Victoria and we can't get simple road projects, simple upgrades to schools, medical—all these things. We have a failing NBN—an NBN that was the envy of the world under the Labor government but now is a joke. In fact, in many areas Telstra are now cutting their 100 megabytes per second plans. They can't deliver it because this government changed from an NBN to an MTM, which became known as Malcolm Turnbull's mess. A place where fixed wireless—

Mr Pasin interjecting—

Please, Member for Barker, you shouldn't interrupt because all you do is to show you don't have to have a long neck to be a goose! We see, every single day, that businesses can't function because of this government's failure to deliver a proper National Broadband Network. We were leading the world in these things. We were a country that could be proud of what we were doing. But, under this government, we have seen Australia's rankings in many, many different categories fail and fall backwards, because this is a government that is not interested in working for the Australian people; it's only working for itself.

Mr Pasin interjecting—

As we sit here today and listen to government members carry on like pork chops, we know that there are billions of dollars of taxpayers' money being deliberately rorted. These programs have been corrupted by a government that has no integrity and no Australian values. It's all about its own self. Its own survival is far more paramount than what it does for the country. That's why we have a government that is seeing emissions rise. We have minister after minister after minister after minister being investigated because of rorting and because of their actions that are outside of what should happen. If we want to talk about the integrity in parliament and in democracy we can't look at this lot opposite, because there is none—it is a total vacuum of integrity and decency.

Each and every day, Australians have to wake up and face what they've got—a government that does not care about what they're doing. Each and every single day, kids go to school and as they sit there they're looking at classrooms that need repairing—stuff that needs to be done. As I said, we're watching kids fall backwards. And what does the education minister do? Nothing. And this is an education minister that thinks that Africa is a country! Let's remember that. That's our starting point.

We see a government that has continually done nothing but allow the extremists in their parties to control. We see a government that is run by the backbench of the National Party more than it is run by the frontbench of the Liberal Party. We see that each and every day. This is a government that has failed Australians on each and every level. What it is doing is really dragging us backwards—this country of ours that is so great and has delivered so much across the world. And what do we get? We get a government that has no faith in its people, no faith in the country's ability, and is too busy focusing on itself.

The more and more we look at this the worse and worse it gets. There is not a member on that side who could actually stand up and say they've got the integrity to do their job properly, because they haven't, or they would be standing up each and every day and saying, 'You know what? As a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a friend, you'd be doing everything you could to do the best for your kids and your grandkids. But this government doesn't.' You only have to listen to the rhetoric. They focus on the now. They're not interested in the future. They're not interested in building wealth. They're not interested in building a greater society. They're only interested in building their own egos. And Australians are paying for it.

We have seen the carry-on over Holden deciding to close. Well, we knew that was going to happen. Of course that was going to happen, because this government ripped the guts out of it. They went to an election saying, 'We're going to destroy the auto industry.' Well, that's one thing they started that they actually completed! And now we do not have an Australian manufacturer of motor vehicles. Everything has to be imported.

However, the one thing that they will continue to do, day in, day out, without fear or favour, is to make sure that they feather their own nests above everyone else's. Australians are paying every day because of the incompetence of this government. And the sooner it ends, the sooner the nightmare's finished, the better off we will be as a nation. We will see better health care. We will see better climate policies. We will see better employment. We will get a government that actually wants to help Australians—as I said, to stand up for them, not stand on them. That is the difference between this side of the House and that side of the House. We are not focusing on our own importance like they are; we're focusing on the nation's importance, and that's the difference. We're not running a government where, each and every day, you just don't know what's going to happen. Are we going to have the member for New England have another hissy fit, do another weird little video and come out and start attacking the Deputy Prime Minister? We don't know. We don't know what the member for Dickson is sitting there doing, day in, day out, plotting away; we just know that he's not sitting there quietly. It's time that this government focused—

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