Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

If you were to listen in isolation to the opposition members in this chamber, you really would think Australia was a bit of a basket case right now. In an unhealthy state of mind, everything they say is negative. Everything they say is painting a picture of an Australia that is not in a good place—if you were to listen solely to what they say.

Of course, the Australian people know that that is not the case. The Australian people know because they see and listen to international news, and they know that there is not a continent on this planet, except Australia, that hasn't been ravaged by this pandemic. The previous member said that the primary aim of a government is to keep its people safe. Guess what? We have. We have kept the Australian public safe—and thank you to the Australian people for adhering to the health advice that we were given and that we gave to them. We have kept the Australian people safe. We as a government have been a big part of keeping the Australian people safe. But you never hear that. You never hear any of the positive statistics come out of their mouths. About 12 months ago they were saying that we needed to flat the curve. Deputy Speaker O'Brien, I'm sure you heard that, and I'm sure members opposite remember that, and said that the health advice was that, as a government and as a country, we needed to flatten the curve. Guess what? We did flatten the curve.

You can't eliminate a virus; we know that. There have been outbreaks. There will always will be outbreaks. We were told right at the start that this virus could not be eliminated. As the Prime Minister mentioned today, there would be no country in the world, on both a health front and an economic front, where you would rather be right now than Australia. But, again, there's no acknowledgment of that. Sure, you can look at things and, sure, you can highlight things that we need to look at and maybe we need to get better at. No matter what you do, you can always do a bit better. Sure, we need to discuss those things. But, seriously, not a positive thing has come out of their mouths.

Because we've done so well on the health front—because we did flatten the curve and because we have kept Australians relatively safe from this virus—economically we have done very well as well. Economically, compared to just about any country in the world, we're doing really well. We talk about workers and employment—we are one of the fastest growing economies in the world right now. Unemployment was predicted by the Treasury—if we didn't introduce certain measures—to go to 15 per cent. An extra two million Australians would have been unemployed. It never happened. We capped the unemployment level at 7½ per cent. What's happened to it since then? What's happened to the unemployment rate since then? It's gone to 5.5 per cent. In the budget last week Treasury predicted it would go below five per cent. Is that good for workers? Of course it's good for workers.

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