Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Electoral Matters) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week, the teals have been revealed in this place, because, whilst the parties of government were debating very serious matters of our border security and the rights of those who hold visas to come to our country, we saw an unbelievable stunt. Where the government of the day had taken the very serious decision to deny arrival en masse to Australia to those who hold temporary visas but were located in parts of the world undergoing conflict and crisis, the teals moved an amendment to that very serious piece of legislation that would have seen a humanitarian visa issued for every single one of those visas denied in such serious circumstances. It just goes to show that, when it comes to protecting Australians and protecting Australians' way of life, the teal movement cannot be trusted.

In the lead-up to the last election, we saw and defended Liberal MPs and the Liberal Party making claims that the Greens and the teals had very similar voting records. Indeed, we tabled information that showed that, more than 80 per cent of the time, teal MPs vote with the Greens. I wonder now whether we are seeing the teal movement exposed as more extreme than even the Australian Greens, because it was the teal MPs in this place who sought to amend a bipartisan piece of legislation that sought to keep Australians safe, to protect Australians and to protect our way of life. That is something that I cannot forgive nor forget.

Family policy is in focus because the fertility rate in Australia is collapsing. The number of children born to every woman in Australia is now just 1.4, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 live births per woman. But it does raise the very curious question of 'what is a woman?' In my home state of Western Australia, the Western Australian government now issues a handheld pregnancy record to mothers-to-be, and it includes this fascinating insight: 'This handbook has information about the reproductive cycle and uses sexed language to avoid confusion.' So far, so good, but it continues, saying: 'Words such as "mother" and "woman" also include people who do not identify as women but have given birth to the infant they may be breastfeeding. If you are pregnant or have a new baby and do not identify as a woman or mother, please share your preferred pronouns with your healthcare team so that they can talk to you using words that are comfortable to you.' That is the Western Australian healthcare handheld pregnancy record. To me, in a country where we need to promote childbirth, celebrate families and support those same families to raise the next generation of Australians, the last thing that we should be focused on is the pronouns in use. We shouldn't be asking questions as to whether or not, indeed, it is a woman who gives birth to children in our country. Those seem to be quite self-evident facts to those of us on this side of the House.

Finally, when it comes to energy security, we deserve a very serious debate in this country. The so-called rules based order on which the liberalised world has effectively relied for many decades now, since at least the end of World War II, is indeed broken, and it makes no sense to play by the rules based order when there are actors around the world who would seek to subvert the interests of democracies, like Australia. So we come to the point of seeing the Strait of Hormuz closed to shipping, with some 15 million barrels of oil a day MIA from global markets. Pipelines across Saudi Arabia and, indeed, to the port of Fujairah, which I went to as a sailor, have replaced some six million barrels of that, and the IEA's unprecedented release of 400 million barrels of oil at four million barrels a day has replaced that, leaving a gap of five million. That's why we need to have a serious conversation about resilience and the ability of Australia to once again be an energy independent nation.