As many speakers before me have made very clear, the coalition will be opposing this bill. The truth is, the more we hear about this bill, the more it clearly doesn't stack up. This is basically a plan for Labor ministers to run around the country pork-barrelling; this is not about a strong economy for our nation or about creating jobs.

Quite a remarkable thing has happened to the Labor Party, even in my time here, and that is the massive repudiation of the Hawke-Keating era—this new generation of Labor MPs and Labor leaders who certainly haven't learnt the lessons of the past and are repudiating so much of what Hawke and Keating stood for and, in essence, this reversion back to a centralised economy where the ministers—the very clever ministers here!—will determine—