Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We went to the last election as a government, and we went there with our clear beliefs. They were a fair go for those who have a go, that the best form of welfare is a job and that you don't have to hold people down in order for others to succeed. These are the beliefs that underpin the commitments we took to the Australian people at the last election, and they endorsed those beliefs by returning the members of this government and electing some outstanding new members to sit on these government benches so that we could go forward and implement the commitments we made.

We said we wanted to lower taxes. That's what we said at the election—not increase taxes, as the Labor Party said they wanted to do at the election. We said we wanted to lower taxes, and within weeks of sitting as a government, from the last election, we legislated to lower taxes. But what was the alternative? The Leader of the Opposition, the Labor Party, was against lowering taxes. And they were for lowering taxes. Each way, every day, on lower taxes is what you find from the Labor Party. We said we wanted to legislate the drought fund, because we knew that those right across rural and regional Australia who are hurting from the drought needed that drought support that was determined at the National Drought Summit. We took it to the Australian people. The Leader of the Opposition was against it, was for it—taking each position he possibly could on this issue.

On affordable energy, we have been putting in place the policies we took to the election to ensure that we were supporting the generation of power across our economy and not having any allergies to the source of that energy whatsoever—whether it was on renewable energy, whether it was on pumped hydro, whether it was on ensuring that we had coal-fired power stations in the North with a feasibility study. Whatever it is, we know it's necessary to generate jobs. Those opposite, and in particular the Leader of the Labor Party, cannot make up their mind. He cannot make up his mind on what his policy is. He's going to go to Western Australia this week, and I assume that as soon as he lands the location service enabler will kick in and all of a sudden he'll be for the resources sector. He'll be for the resources sector the second he touches down in Western Australia. But when he gets back to Victoria and he's around the suburbs of Victoria, the location service enabler will kick in again, he'll check his GPS and his language will change completely. Consistency matters, and the Leader of the Opposition hasn't got it.