Chris Crewther (Dunkley, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on how the government is reducing cost-of-living pressures and helping hardworking Australians to get ahead, including in my electorate of Dunkley?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dunkley and recall the many businesses we visited in his electorate and how important it is for them, and the jobs of the men and women that work for them, to have affordable and reliable power. The biggest single pressure on households and business budgets right now is expensive power bills, and what we have seen in South Australia—thanks to the Labor Party's crazy devotion to left ideology instead of practical planning and engineering—is the most expensive and the least reliable electricity in Australia.

We know today that the Leader of the Opposition advocates a 50 per cent Renewable Energy Target, and he was asked four times today, on the ABC, what it would cost. He could not and would not answer the question. Again and again he ran away from the facts, but Sabra Lane pressed on. She was absolutely indefatigable, but he would not give her an answer, until finally she summed up with the attitude that most Australians have with the Leader of the Opposition: 'Mr Shorten, we're out of time.' That is all she could say.

The truth of the matter is that the Labor Party are bumbling around in the dark, and leaving Australians in the dark, about the single biggest threat they are posing right now to jobs and households in Australia. They are proposing to inflict on the Australian people precisely what Jay Weatherill has done to South Australia and what he described as his 'great experiment'. He called it a 'great experiment'. We know what has happened. The experiment has failed. The lights went out. Electricity prices went up. Industries are threatened with closure. People are threatened with losing their jobs.

The fact is that it was a trifecta of blunders by the Leader of the Opposition on the radio today. He was asked how he would pay for the NDIS, and he could not answer that question either. He was asked how he could ensure that outcomes in schools improve—because we know we have been spending more on education and the results are getting worse—and all he could say was, 'Spend more money.' He has no ability to answer these basic questions that are being put to him. How are you going to protect the jobs, the businesses, the households of Australia, when you are proposing to inflict debt and deficit and rising power bills and unreliable power? That is what comes from the Labor Party's ideological approach to economics. They failed in South Australia and they would fail Australia if they ever occupied this side of the House.