Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

This projection, this pixelated, paused Prime Minister, comes to us remotely—he doesn't have enough bandwidth to come to us with clarity, and the audio certainly leaves a lot to be desired. I think it is emblematic of a prime minister leading a government that is all about spin and not about substance. How can the people who elected me, the good people of Paterson, put their trust in this government, a government that has been at the wheel for eight years and yet has achieved so little? And some what they have achieved has actually been patently illegal, as we're learning from robodebt. It's a scandal. I stand here today and hear the minister say, 'Oh no. We've been using average incomes for X number of years,' and he said when they were starting to be used. The true question that needs to be asked of this government is: when did human oversight stop being used? It stopped under this government. So, if they want to talk about delivery, the one thing that this government has delivered is an illegal debt scheme. They have delivered heartbreak to families of Australia who do not deserve it. They have delivered deceit at monumental levels. They have delivered waste. They paid $30 million for a $3 million block of land in Western Sydney in the Leppington Triangle. The money that has gone, wasted by this government, really is eye-watering.

The Prime Minister visited my electorate just a couple of months ago, in October, to posture on a new gas-fired power station. If he was serious, those jobs would be welcomed in my electorate. However, the industry has said that there is not a chance that it's going to be needed. So he just came up to make a big man of himself in my community, in my home town, in the hope that the people would think: 'Well, this government's good. They're going to build this gas-fired power station. That's going to bring my energy bills down.' Let me tell you, after 20 energy policies—they're not policies; they're actually just thought bubbles!—we still do not have lower electricity prices. We've still not done anything meaningful in relation to delivering better outcomes for our environment. And we are still waiting on where the energy is actually going to come from. I know this topic so well because I have the New South Wales and the eastern seaboard battery in my electorate, and it is in the form of an aluminium smelter. On the weekend, when it was clocking over 40 degrees, it was the smelter in my electorate that had to be curtailed so that we had enough energy in New South Wales to keep the air con running. For the members of the government who say, 'The Labor Party doesn't understand energy,' we actually understand it very well.

Also, one of the things that really makes me absolutely wonder about this whole question of delivery versus announcement is when this government says: 'Well, it's not up to us. The market will sort it out.'

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