Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to oppose this motion today, and, in doing so, I reflect on the situation that the mover of this motion, the member for Fadden, finds himself at the moment. I just wonder why he's spending so much energy attacking the government, when actually is the Labor Party really the threat in Fadden at the moment? I also reflect on whether there's much point in pointing out the inaccuracies of the Liberal-National coalition, because is anyone in the community really worried about what the Liberal-National coalition are doing at the moment?

I think that where we are now is really a chance to look at how we've got here. We know it's tough. Any local member that's out there in the community—which I'm sure is all 150 of us—knows that people are really doing it tough at the moment, that it is like being out in the trenches there, whether it is finding somewhere to live, whether it's paying an electricity bill. The question, though, is how did we get there? Remember that, federally, over the last 30 years or so, the Liberal-National coalition has been in government for 20 of them. So it's really incredible to think that, after barely four years, this government would have been able to fix the problems that we were left with.

But it is not just the Liberal-National coalition that I'd criticise for this. It is, I guess, a certain mind virus, which took over governments over the last 30 or 40 years, of economic rationalism, this idea that the government should completely absent itself from the field. The one thing that I would try and say to your colleagues in the Liberal-National coalition, Deputy Speaker Buchholz, is to have a look at what made the Liberal-National coalition and the Liberal Party successful in postwar Australia.

In many ways, one of my economic role models was the Liberal premier of South Australia, who was the Premier from 1940 to 1970. He was probably the greatest proponent of building public housing in Australia. We saw that, after 30 years or so of his being in government, of his making sure that within the actual charter of the South Australian Housing Trust was that it would aid in the economic development of the state, of his following an economic policy which essentially provided cheap, affordable housing to workers—you had car workers, railway workers, teachers living in public housing—it was able to keep the pressure off wages, and that was, in turn, able to help business. But what we saw, really, under the Howard governments and under the Morrison government—the Morrison government built something like 370 public houses in the whole 10 years it was in there. What we saw there was a complete abrogation of its responsibilities to intervene in that marketplace and step in where the private sector was clearly failing.

That's why I'm slightly surprised that the Liberal-National coalition keeps wanting to attack the government for the situation that people find themselves in at the moment. This government really is taking, I think, for the first time in decades, a much more interventionist role in the economy—trying to fill that gap that was left by previous governments absenting the space—whether that is in housing, in undertaking the biggest public housing building program in a generation; whether that is in energy, in supercharging the investment in renewable energy to the point where we now have more electricity in the grid than at any other time; whether that be intervening in Medicare, in the biggest single investment of recent times in Medicare, which has restored bulk-billing to, for example, double the number of bulk-billing clinics in Forde alone; whether that's intervening in our critical industries, such as the billion-dollar investment in the smelter in Gladstone, the billions of dollars being invested in Whyalla to maintain our steelworks and the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in Mount Isa to maintain the smelters there; whether it's intervening again to make sure that TAFE is back up and running again by providing free TAFE to give our tradies and our economy the skills that are needed to build the housing that is so desperately needed. This government is fixing up the problems, and it is going to take a lot of time, but I would encourage the Liberal-National coalition, rather than trying to chase One Nation votes, to go back to their grassroots.

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