Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

The beauty of the morning is not just the rising of the sun but the opportunity of a new day. As I walk the streets of Goldstein, fresh after the night's rest, I meet Australians brimming with a sense of optimism—young families building their first home, retirees who gave their best years to this country, small-business owners taking a risk on their dream. What unites them all is a simple but profound desire: hope for the future—hope that tomorrow will be better than today and hope that their children will inherit a nation of not just wealth but wisdom, resilience and opportunity. But we all know hope doesn't sustain itself.

I wish I could say that our current government are calling us to a common purpose or that they are encouraging us to lean into the future with optimism. But, around the kitchen tables of the nation, it feels like Australians have a better sense of the challenges for our nation than our current government does. They are asking hard questions: Can I afford to raise my family here? Will my business survive another storm? Do my children have a future in this country or must they seek it elsewhere?

Hope must be grounded in reality, and the reality is that Australia faces challenges, from global uncertainty to rising costs of living to an economy in transition. Yet in every challenge lies opportunity and in every setback the chance for renewal. Hope for Australia isn't just naive optimism. It's the conviction that, when people are empowered, when the government serves rather than smothers and when enterprise is unleashed, we can transform adversity into achievement. Hope means a nation where small business is not burdened by red tape but lifted by opportunity. Hope means harnessing our resources and ingenuity to power the world not with fear of decline but with confidence in Australian innovation. Hope means that, no matter who you are or where you start, your children can dream bigger than you dared and achieve more.

Our forebears understood that Australia's greatest asset is not coal or the abundance of sun, not even our beaches or bush, but our people—industrious, fair minded, determined, coupled with a sense of a fair go. The Liberal tradition has always believed in the dignity of the individual, in the community that supports them and in the responsibility that we owe each other.

This government will end. There is hope. We can have an economy built on aspiration, where reward flows from effort and where every Australian can advance through their enterprise. We can have a society of unity, where diversity is celebrated not as a dividing line but as part of the great tapestry of our nation. We can have a resilient nation where we stand tall in the world, confident in our values, secure in our alliances and ready to shape our destiny. We cannot outsource this responsibility. It's the responsibility of every Australian and the duty of every parliamentarian in this chamber to lead with courage, to govern with humility and to restore the belief that the best days of our country are not behind us but ahead.

Hope is not given; it is built. Together, we can build it—brick by brick, business by business, family by family. The story of Australia has never been written in despair; it has always been a story of hope, and so it shall remain. That is the great task of this parliament, but it is not what is being delivered by this government. What we have seen from the speeches we've heard during question time and the answers that have been given in this MPI today is a government that is simply uninterested in the focus of the issues and concerns of Australians right now. For the people in the suburbs all the way through to the rural and regional centres of this country, they've had a complete disregard for not just the urgency of the needs these people face but, more importantly, the need to take all of us forward together. Their job goes beyond just facing the immediate challenges but to inspiring us towards a better future, to give us a sense of hope about what we can achieve together to be able to realise a better future shared, because Australia can be a great nation. That is what it means to leave people behind, that is what it means when we have a country that does not appeal to our best selves and that is the challenge we face right now. This government will end, and there will be hope.

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