Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of questions asked. There was a bit of confusion from my perspective today about what some coalition senators' questions were really about, but I'm going to start with the question from Senator Askew, who was asking about women's reproductive health and assisted reproductive technology. It is true that we had to delay the commencement date of the assisted reproductive technology storage funding commitment. It was delayed to 1 July 2023 because—and this is something that people really need to understand—the measure cannot be delivered by 1 November 2022, which was the date originally announced by the former government. The delay will provide time to consult with the sector and develop the detailed administrative design of the measure.

With nine years of incompetence from the former government, I'm in a bit of a pickle about what I really want to talk about here today. Electricity prices also were brought up today, but I did speak about them yesterday or the day before. We've got these issues where the opposition come in and act as though they have no responsibility for anything that happened in the past nine years. I know they were a pretty lazy government and I know they were really good at announcements. They like power—I'm not talking about the electricity type of power; they like power for power's sake. But, when it came to electricity, to renewables and to things like climate change, they were just all over the place. In the past nine years, they had 22 different policies on power, but they didn't implement them. I think they had nine ministers—if I'm correct.

There was no strategy and no real approach to anything, except to make great big promises to people. They promised the world to everyone. They were spending money like they were drunken sailors. Seriously! Now we have to come in and clean up the mess. You don't have to be Einstein to work out that, if I were to promise my granddaughter a $700,000 present and I didn't have $700,000, someone would have to help me clean up that mess. That's what we're doing. We are cleaning up the mess of the previous government.

With regard to the health issue, jumping back to Senator Askew's question, the previous government neglected our healthcare system for the last nine years. They absolutely neglected it. You provided funding for cancer patients to access Medicare subsidised reproductive services, but you were all talk about it; there was no delivery. That is typical of those on the other side. I know they haven't taken well to being in opposition. We understand that. They act like kindergarten children throughout question time because they cannot come to grips with the fact that they are no longer the government. I'm not sure how long it's going to take them to move on from denial, but it's taking a bit long in my books. They need to grow up a bit. They need to treat this parliament, this chamber and, in fact, the President with some respect, and they need to start taking responsibility. They say, 'Oh, the Labor Party's done this,' and, 'The government's done that.' You had nine years; you did nothing.

I think back to when Mr Abbott was campaigning for one of the elections—I can't quite remember which election it was. He said, 'No cuts to education; no cuts to health.' And then he came in and razor-ganged the health area, as well as the education sector and others. 'No cuts to pensions,' he said. He just came in, took no account of what he had promised and made the health area so much worse.