Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to tell you a story about a man from Queensland who was doing a job for the last three years which was somewhat related to government—in fact, I would say it was quite heavily related to the functioning of Canberra's government. He did that job for three years. Then, after the election that was conducted earlier this year, he read a book from America. The book was called Abundance, and this man read this book. After he read this book, he discovered that what he had been doing in the first three years of this job was all wrong—it was terrible. He read an American book to discover that what he'd being doing in Canberra was actually wrecking Australia. The man's name is Dr Jim Chalmers, who is the Treasurer of Australia.

Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is he a doctor?

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, he is a doctor; he's a doctor of something. He's read a book and now he's changed his whole view about what's happened in the last three years. He's repudiated three years of Labor government, where they put in place 5,000 new regulations—and growing. Today we see in the newspaper or on the TV that there are going to be more regulations. Now YouTube is banned. All sorts of websites are going to be filtered by the government. We're going to have more and more regulations. The problem with this is that's not what the book said to do. The book told him that he needed to cut regulations and to abolish the thicket of regulations that he's been talking about alongside the housing minister and Dr Leigh. Maybe this book wasn't actually well thought through, in the sense that he didn't understand what it said. Maybe he needs to read another book because he's at risk of doing again what he did in the first three years, which is more laws, more regulations and more red tape, which is bad.