Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity given to me a few minutes ago to make reflections on the Governor-General's address. I want to make a few reflections on His Excellency's address to the parliament. First of all, in the traditional fashion, the speech set out the government's agenda for this term. It's a newly elected Labor government. In the election campaign, we had as our mantra that we're going to be a government that did what we said we were going to do. So that does mean, in the Governor-General's address, some of the commitments that he unfolded—making child care cheaper, putting downward pressure on energy prices, bringing down the cost of prescription medicine, introducing fee-free TAFE, introducing the National Reconstruction Fund legislation and this parliament resolving new targets around emissions, fundamentally settling, in my view, a final position around climate change—have already been implemented. These initiatives, which the Governor-General set out, have already been implemented, apart from the National Reconstruction Fund, and I'll come to that in a moment.

This government is setting about very carefully doing what it is that we said that we would do. That is, I have to say, because, as a government, we did opposition a bit differently over the course of the last term. I think previously Mr Abbott had set the template for what political opposition looked like in Australia, just wrecking and saying no and being destructive. The Labor Party, led by Albanese throughout the course—it felt pretty long—of our three years in opposition, actually took a thoughtful approach to learning the lessons of why it was that we weren't successful at the 2019 election, internalising those lessons, doing the careful policy development work and not being noisy and shouty when it came to how we dealt with the agenda of what passed for the Morrison government. We actually did opposition in a way that Australians expected us to. That bore real fruit in the national interest during the course of the COVID pandemic, because it would have been open to the opposition to take a hyper partisan approach during the COVID period. It would have been open to us to oppose everything that the government proposed, but, in fact, what the opposition—now the government—did was carefully deal with all of those issues in the national interest and meet the government halfway on some of the questions that mattered. We did opposition differently. It meant that when we came to making our commitments in the lead up to the last election, voters took those commitments seriously.

What I'd observe, in giving out a little bit of free advice to those opposite, is that none of that self-reflection has occurred in the Liberal and National parties. There has been none of that reflection about what it was that was so corrosively bad about the government that they were all a part of. This was a terrible government, the Morrison government. This was a government that sat on the shoulders of two pretty ordinary governments before it. But it was, in itself, the worst government since Federation in Australia. It was a government that would have made Billy McMahon feel sick. It was such a poor government because it lacked ambition for the country; they only had ambition for themselves.