Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise in support of this very important motion, because Australians are doing it tough. In response to that they need a government that does two things. First of all, it needs to care. It needs to see this as a top priority in its agenda. It needs to be something it is responding to right here right now. That leads to the second thing they need, which is a plan.

Every time we faced a curveball in government—and you do face curveballs in government; that's the nature of it, and particularly the last couple of years have been tumultuous—understandably, those on the opposite side of this place were very fond of saying, 'You need to take responsibility and you need to have a plan.' When a curveball comes at them they ignore it and say: 'No, we don't need to have a plan. We don't need to take responsibility.' The truth is Australians want them to have a plan. I'll tell you why—because they are feeling pain when they are at the bowser, they are feeling pain when they pay their bills, they are feeling pain at the check-out and they are feeling pain when they upgrade their house.

All we get from those opposite is a vanity project—the job summit last week. Do you know what we got out of that vanity project last week? We got a return to the 1970s. I lived through the 1970s. Tie-dye was alright. ELO was one of the better productions of the 1970s. I'll tell you what was wrong with the 1970s—inflation. That is the cost of living. The cost of living was off the charts. ELO might have been on the charts, but the cost of living was off the charts. It was insanely high. We saw interest rates going to a level where families like mine, farmers and small-business people, were in extreme pain. We saw that for real.

The truth of the matter is that those opposite have come forward with no plan and they are making a bad situation worse. Let me talk about what we're going to see in the next couple of months. In the next couple of months we're going to see the interest rate increases that have come through—

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