Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of answers given by Senator Cormann today. Of course, Senator Cormann not only has former Prime Minister Turnbull's blood on his hands; he now also has Matthew Guy's as well. He's like the boy who played with matches, and he's burnt the whole Liberal house down. A smouldering ruin is left in what was once the jewel in the Liberal crown—104 Exhibition Street is being sold; a decent Liberal leader in Victoria is now gone. I know Matthew Guy. He is a decent and talented person, but his campaign was hijacked by federal errorists. These are the same bunglers who declared Melbourne, a very safe and very liveable city, to be unsafe at night, even though our nightlife is the envy of many—perhaps especially those in Sydney—and it has very little trouble. Even on long dark winter nights in Melbourne, hundreds of thousands of people come into the city on weekend nights to watch the AFL, to dine in some of the best restaurants in the world and to have a nightcap in some of our laneway bars, and, in summer, hundreds of thousands of people are out for the cricket, the tennis and the myriad of other events that are run in Melbourne and to enjoy the beauty of the city.

The errorists in the federal Liberal Party, the bungling federal Liberals who came to town, wanted to create fear, and we could hear it in Senator Cormann's responses today. They wanted to create economic fear, social fear and racial fear. In Victoria, they wanted to divide Victorian against Victorian. Bungling federal Liberals came to town and they demanded Victorian Liberals be more extreme on every issue. But don't take my word for it; let's go to the front page of The Australian and Chip Le Grand's article today. Underneath the headline 'Puffer-jacket squad delivers pained message', it said:

Along the beaches of Sandringham, beneath the lush, elm-tree canopies of Hawthorn, from dress-circle addresses in Brighton, they marched into polling booths to deliver a message that will send political shockwaves from Melbourne to Canberra. The Liberal Party, their Liberal Party, no longer spoke to them. In Daniel Andrews, they saw a Premier promising to deliver more of the essential services and infrastructure that a fast-growing city needed.

Then there are many quotes from Liberal voters and an expose of some of the seats where some of the candidates fielded by Labor nearly won. That included Brighton, where a very young candidate, a 19-year-old still on his drivers permit, nearly won against someone who should have had no contest in that seat.

By contrast, what did Daniel Andrews and Labor talk about? They talked about schools and hospitals. They talked about TAFE colleges. They talked about kindergartens and child care. They talked about trains and trams. They talked about how Labor has removed 29 level crossings in four years. And I want to pay tribute to a friend of mine, Fiona Richardson, who, as many here know, died of breast cancer. When she was shadow public transport minister it was her policy idea to remove those level crossings. And those policy ideas, the policy development that goes on in the Labor Party—as opposed to the thought bubbles to which we have all been subject to from the Liberal Party recently—is what we do in the Labor Party. Daniel Andrews and the Labor team set out concrete, practical plans to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing Victoria. They talked about inclusion and equality, not exclusion and division.

Senator Cormann himself might not be able to draw any lessons from Saturday in Victoria, but we have. I noticed that some of the contributions from the other side have talked about smugness et cetera—we're not smug; we know this is going to be a tough campaign—and then there's talk that we 'don't understand'. But you can see from the campaign that the Labor Party ran and what we have done, and from the fact that the Premier is back at work at 1 Treasury Place today, that we do listen, we do take action and we do care about what people think. And we know that if you offer voters a program of moderate, sensible, practical reforms, reforms that address problems and help Australians, they will respond positively. (Time expired)