Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, it's an interesting thing. I take the interjection, Member for Wright. There's an interesting distinction between the city and the country. It's something that we'll need to look at. I've got a few ideas about that, but I'm not going to go into that tonight.

I think there's a stark difference between—again, I acknowledge the Labor Party; they can run a great campaign. I don't think they necessarily run as great an economy, and there are some interesting things I want to point out tonight. We raised it again in question time today. I think everyone gets up and talks about integrity. I don't have a problem with the sense that the Labor party, back before the 2022 election, said that they'd done modelling—I believe they did, and I think they believe the modelling was right and the modelling was thorough. That's what they said at the time, and I understand and believe that they believed that, five years later, your power bill would be $275 lower than it was in 2022. That hasn't happened.

You may say there are reasons for that, but this government has never acknowledged that. They won't answer the question and they'll go to something else. 'They're down six per cent,' they were saying today. They won't acknowledge that it hasn't happened and, in fact, power bills are up a thousand bucks for most families. They'll say, 'Oh, it's down six per cent in the last year.' That's true, too, but the fact is that—and this is where I think people struggle sometimes with what political leaders are saying—you just need to acknowledge that and maybe explain why you thought that happened. You might have reasons why the modelling—what the model did and what the model assumed that wasn't right should be explained to the public. There are others.

Again, there are questions that we were asking yesterday and today in parliament. The Prime Minister was obviously saying in the election campaign, 'The only thing you will need'—I haven't got it!—'when you go and see a GP is this,' and he'd hold up his Medicare card. The statistics have said—this is not me; they're public, so you can't refute them—that bulk-billing has fallen in the last three years. Again you might say, 'There were reasons that happened that were out of our control.' Well, tell us what they were. Then we had the health minister today or yesterday saying, 'We never said that universal bulk-billing would be 100 per cent.' You can see the cleverness here—the slipperiness of the language. It was hundreds of times through the campaign: 'This is all you will need when you go to the GP.' Australians who don't have a lot of time to take in politics, to watch politics or to listen to the debates would believe that and go, 'Great, all we're going to need when we go and see our GP is our Medicare card.' That's not the truth. (Time expired)

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