Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the three weeks since we were last in this place, I've been pleased to be able to be meeting with my constituents again, face to face rather than virtually. It's been really good to be able to talk to people about how they feel our community and our country are travelling.

One of the clearest messages I've been receiving in the last three weeks is about just how disappointed people are with the way that this Prime Minister does his job. This came through to me very clearly during the Prime Minister's recent trip to Glasgow, when, as part of that trip, he decided to leak private text messages that he'd received from the French president. From the conversations I've been having with people in my electorate, they were just aghast at this behaviour. They know that this isn't how they would behave in their own personal or professional dealings. They wouldn't leak private text messages to try and make a point, yet the Prime Minister of our country is behaving in that way and is treating our foreign relationships in that way. They were genuinely appalled.

The conversations I've been having with many people are around how this Prime Minister is just not up to the job and continually fails to show the leadership that our community expects from someone in that role. They don't expect that the person who is our Prime Minister will provoke an undiplomatic fight with a foreign leader because he's actually obsessed with his own image and pathologically unable to tell the truth. It is really distressing to people in my community, and it concerns them that that is the way this Prime Minister behaves.

Of course, we returned yesterday to the theme of text messages and untruths during question time, when the Prime Minister initially claimed that he'd sent the opposition leader a text message to tell him that he was off to Hawaii for holidays, during the bushfires, which we all remember very well. Then, an hour later, after being called out about that, the Prime Minister retracted and explained to the House that in fact he hadn't told the opposition leader where he was going. There is a pattern of behaviour—that we see in this place, that we see outside this place and that people in our community see—from this Prime Minister, who will say anything in the moment to score a political point. It is genuinely unsettling for those of us in the community who think that this is a leadership role and that it should carry the qualities with it of being trustworthy, of looking out for the interests of others and not just looking out for your own interests.

It was particularly distressing to see those qualities on display most recently in response to some terrible things that have been happening in my home town of Melbourne. We have had some very difficult protests over the past couple of weeks—people protesting in front of our state parliament with mock gallows, with images of politicians in our state. That has been really difficult, and it is the type of behaviour that every political leader in this country should unreservedly condemn. But of course with this Prime Minister there was a 'but'. There was a 'but' because he is dog whistling and chasing votes from the fringe, a strategy that maybe he didn't want to reveal but that was revealed very clearly by whoever is cutting the material for his Facebook page, where, instead of posting in no uncertain terms condemnation of this type of behaviour, the Prime Minister posted the strategy lines that he had obviously worked to put in afterwards. It is really dangerous not to call out this behaviour, because not doing so deepens divisions in our community. It enables attacks on our democracy. I say again: it is not what we expect of our leaders. Our leaders should be the people who bring us together, not the people who encourage division, not the people who encourage people who seem to be encouraging violence against other politicians in our country.

The Prime Minister has failed to pull people on his own side into line. We still have government members sharing dangerous misinformation on their Facebook pages. Again, all of us have seen in our communities what impact that misinformation is having. It is putting people at risk. It means that people are getting information that is not medically sound and is not actually the best advice for them and for their community. And it is being spread by government members. I say again: it is so disappointing that the person who leads our country, who should be the person who brings us all together at this most difficult time, does none of those things and is in fact dog whistling and seeking to deepen divisions.

The Prime Minister also, at that opportunity, took the time to give us some lines around how we all just want governments out of our lives. That made me reflect on the record of this Morrison government in my home state of Victoria over the past couple of years, during the pandemic. I would like to share some times when I think we really would have liked government, particularly the Morrison government, in our lives over the past couple of years. We would have liked them in our lives earlier this year, when we should have had vaccines so that we didn't need any more lockdowns. But instead we had a government that failed to order the vaccines and put us at the back, not at the front, of the queue. As a result, we've had a much more difficult year than we should have had. We would have liked the Morrison government to be in our lives last year, when our aged-care homes weren't protected as they should have been by the federal government, which is responsible for aged care, for the settings in aged care and for the safety of people in aged care and absolutely failed to do any of those things, absolutely failed elderly people in my community and their families. We had deaths. We had people who were afraid for their loved ones. That just should not have been the case. We would have loved to have had the Morrison government in our lives at those times. We would have loved for this government to have discharged its duty, to have shown the leadership that we should have from a Prime Minister, from a national federal government, in a time of crisis. But we did not get it. Time after time we have a failure of leadership. We have this Prime Minister demonstrating that he will say whatever he thinks it takes to win but he will not say the things that bring our community together. He will not say the things that put us on the track for a better future for all of us.

The other big failing that has been raised with me when I talk to people in my community is this Morrison government's failure to take any serious and meaningful action on climate change. Last time we were in this place we had a lot of posturing from the government on climate change. We got told that things were resolved now and that the Prime Minister had pulled the Nationals into line. We had an agreement, a commitment to net zero to 2050 and a plan to get us there. Well, we now know the plan was a sham. The modelling was fake. We're not even going to get there under this modelling. There's a gap in technologies that we'll apparently magically discover some time in the future. This is the plan that this Prime Minister took to Glasgow—not a plan, a sham. We are so far behind the rest of the world and that will cost this country. It will cost us the jobs and the opportunities. As the rest of the world shifts to clean energy, we will miss out on those opportunities.

As our planet continues to warm, we will not be doing what this country should be doing to make sure that we limit warming so that it remains below dangerous levels. This is critical. When I talk about leadership, this is a major challenge and it is a challenge that this Prime Minister just refuses to pick up. Instead, he is apparently led by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Leader of the Nationals, who's made it clear that even though he's a member of the government he didn't sign up to any agreements out of Glasgow. So it's very unclear: is Australia a signatory to agreements that came out of Glasgow, or are we standing aside and in fact making our pariah case even stronger? No wonder Australia was ranked dead last in developed countries for both our policy and the actions we've taken to address climate change.

People in my community could not be clearer with me: they know this is urgent. They know that we need a genuine plan, not a sham, in place to address climate change. They know that time is running out. They have seen through this government and they have seen through this Prime Minister. They are looking for genuine leadership. They aren't looking for more spin, more focus group lines or being bought off with sham modelling. What they want to see is a genuine plan, a genuine commitment and a genuine way forward on climate change, and all the things that should build our country back stronger, and stronger for all of us, as we come out of this pandemic. That's the leadership they're looking for. They're not going to get it from this Prime Minister. They will get it from Labor under Anthony Albanese, and people in my community are very aware of that.