Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

'One,' my colleague the member for New England says. You're a generous man, because it is none. None, Deputy Speaker—not once. I don't believe that the Prime Minister has amnesia. I don't believe that the Prime Minister has forgotten his commitments. I don't believe that the Prime Minister doesn't recall looking into the barrel of the camera, repeatedly making a commitment to the Australian public. I don't believe that he's forgotten about that, but I do believe that he's made decisions that have resulted in Australians paying more for their electricity bills, not less, and if he had the decency that Australians thought in May 2022 he might have, he'd apologise to the Australian public. I think he'd say, 'Look, I thought that I could deliver this for you. I thought that I could make decisions that could reduce your electricity and gas bills not just by $275 once off but by $275 a year,' but he's made no mention of that. He hasn't provided any apology.

The incompetence continues to this very day. We've seen it in relation to a number of areas. On child care, one of the key commitments this Prime Minister made to the Australian public is that the Labor Party would reduce the cost of child care in this country. The fact is that the cost of child care is now up 9½ per cent on the last 12 months. Families with young children in child care would have voted for the Prime Minister based on that promise alone. Instead, now, after the Prime Minister has been in government for just over 15 months, they're paying almost 10 per cent more for child care every day when they drop their kids off.

This government made a huge promise around increasing real wages. There are millions of workers across the country that listened to the rhetoric of the Prime Minister and the now Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. But do we have real wage growth in this country? We certainly do not. The minister is up here trumpeting the fact that people have a pay rise that doesn't keep up with the cost-of-living pressures created by this government. This government is spending an extra $185 billion. What does that do to inflation in our country? It drives it up. If inflation goes up, people pay more for their mortgages. And it's not just their mortgages: small businesses are now paying double-digit interest rates for their overdrafts.

If you speak to people around the country, as we do, in cafes, in restaurants, in other small businesses employing Australians—maybe one or two or five or 25 Australians—there's a common theme across the country: they are completely and utterly disillusioned with this Prime Minister. They thought they could take him at his word. They thought that the management that the coalition provided when we were in government to manage the economy through good times and bad would continue. But under this government it is clear they have not, and families are suffering, small businesses are suffering, and this government predicts that unemployment will go up over the course of the next 12 months—that is, that tens or hundreds of thousands of Australians will lose their jobs as a result of decisions taken by this Prime Minister. The Prime Minister made no mention of that before he was elected.

The one thing he did say, though—and I'll give him credit for this—the one thing he did commit to on the night of the election in May 2022 was that he would deliver a Canberra based voice to the Australian people. He nominated it as his highest priority. He said to the Australian public that he would dedicate himself, which he's done over the course of the last 15 months or so, to his proposal around the Canberra Voice. I think it's been, as many Australians now understand, to the disadvantage of the vast majority of Australians because the Prime Minister and his cabinet have been focused on this issue of the Voice. They've been completely and utterly distracted from the core business of managing the economy, and Australians are picking up that bill.

Have we had a coherent plan from the Prime Minister? They've had 15 months to formulate the plan in relation to the Voice. You saw on display again today, and countless question times have demonstrated this, the Minister for Indigenous Australians could not answer a single question in relation to the Voice. When asked to recall a detail about a publicly reported comment she made in 2019, she read from a pre-prepared script—yet again. It had no relevance to the question being asked, and somehow the Australian public is being prepared for 14 October, when you will be asked to place your faith blindly in that minister and this Prime Minister, but there is no transparency. There is deliberately no detail. When we say to the Prime Minister or to the Minister for Indigenous Australians, as we asked yesterday: 'When you say that the Voice is going to be restricted to only Indigenous health or Indigenous education, how can you say that? On what legal basis can you say that?' We asked the question: what policies don't apply to Indigenous Australians?

The wording that's before the Australian public is so broad that it will give rise to an opportunity for a voice made up of people of the quality of Marcia Langton and of people like Mr Mayo, a committed communist. These will be the people with the loudest voice in the country. It will divide our country. That's what the Prime Minister is proposing. In his own words, he has said that he will preside over a voice, and he will be afraid to reject their advice to him. He said it would be a very brave Prime Minister to reject the advice of the Voice. Somehow on one day, in one part of the country, the Prime Minister is saying to Australians that this is just a meek and mild opportunity to say yes—and we saw it repeated here today—but instead this is the most significant change proposed to our nation's rule book in our country's history. And it's without precedent. No leader in our country's history, Liberal or Labor, has ever gone to a referendum seeking to mislead the Australian people, seeking to deceive them, seeking to starve them of the opportunity to have their own minds made up by reading what it is the government's proposing. I think it is a shocking act from a prime minister who should be about uniting this country. He should be about providing the practical outcomes for Indigenous Australians, instead of investing a significant amount of power in people like Marcia Langton, who suggests that a quarter of the country is somehow racist or stupid. There are millions of Australians who will vote no. Good on them, because they're standing up to a very weak prime minister.

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