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

Six months ago Australians went to the polls and they weren't sure about the direction of their country. I've said publicly before that, when Australians went to the polls six months ago, they were nervous about their future. They were anxious. They did not feel that their government was necessarily the right government for the nation. But we also, I believe on our side, failed to give Australians a viable alternative. As a consequence, people ultimately made the choice that they felt was available to them. They were forced to vote for a bad government to be re-elected because they had no alternative. That's our failure. It's not something for Labor members to come into this chamber and air punch around and celebrate their incredible victory. At the end of the day, it has not been this massive vote of confidence in Labor government or its direction for our country, because it doesn't have one.

There was one seat where things were a little bit different. The seat, of course, in context was the federal electorate of Goldstein. We're enormously proud of what happened in the context of the federal electorate of Goldstein, because what we saw was where hope transcended fear and where a campaign run from local residents standing up for the type of community we wanted to be transcended a lot of the issues that were presented by the former member. It's very important to remember what happened. They campaigned on the basis of trust and climate action, but, as soon as they were elected to office, what happened? They did things like vote for billions of dollars of new coal and gas subsidies, despite saying they would do other things—as did the member for Wentworth, as did the member for Curtin, as did the member for Kooyong, as did the member for North Sydney and as did the member for Mackellar.

When you're campaigning on the basis of trust and then you go and break such a pledge to your community, it is a fundamental breach of trust with the community that will no doubt continue to haunt them for the rest of their political days. Even Senator Joyce and Senator Canavan didn't vote for these subsidies. But you had, at the time, the member for Goldstein, the member for Kooyong, the member for Mackellar, the member for Curtin and the member for North Sydney voting for billions of dollars in new fossil fuel subsidies. It raises a fundamental issue of trust.

Nonetheless, Goldstein made a different choice, because it saw that there was a direct consequence, despite having been told it was going to have a community backed Independent who was going to stand by the community. It watched $100 million worth of social infrastructure ripped out of the community. The member for Maribyrnong, who just gave her speech, boasted about all of the resources that this Labor government is now giving specifically to her community. Well, Goldstein had a very different experience during the last term of parliament. We watched as $100 million of local infrastructure funding was ripped out of our community, and what went with it was the financial resources that the City of Bayside and the Glen Eira had to upgrade things like the Wilson Storage oval in Sandringham, McKinnon Reserve and, of course, Brighton Beach Oval. What it meant is that women don't have change room facilities in our community despite election commitments having consistently been made to deliver them. This is the problem. Despite all the rhetoric and all the spin, Labor has failed the Goldstein community, and we are continuing to miss out.

Now is the time for us to stand up, because in another six months this Labor government will not have just failed Goldstein; it will have failed Australia. I've never seen a time when we've had a government that has been so inept and disinterested in combating open corruption. That's because there are cartel kickbacks that go from CFMEU public projects all the way through to connections to the Labor Party itself. Only last week we had an outrageous situation—

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