MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (15:38): I'm going to be a little bit more positive. I believe we live in the greatest country on earth, and I think everybody in this chamber would absolutely endorse what I just said. I believe our best days are ahead of us.
And they certainly are. The member for Fenner was rather negative in his comments. First of all, he spoke of just the two parties.
But you had Artie Fadden leading the Country Party, a former prime minister, dare I say, at a time when, yes, housing was a big issue, like it is now—he mentioned the new drugs on the PBS. I do thank the health minister, who's at the table, because every new drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is saving lives. Every single drug is saving lives.
And the member for Hunter, who has just left the chamber, is doing some good work in the space of men and boys, as a special envoy in that regard. We all come to this place trying to make the country a better place. But this matter of public importance is about the government driving the fall of living standards of Australians.
Sadly, that is true. Let me just give you some examples, because we need to be doing so much better than what is being offered at the moment. First of all, we've got veterans.
I appreciate that this morning we had the minister giving a very good speech at the establishment of not just the Veteran and Family Wellbeing Agency but also the Parliamentary Friends of Veterans. But the $5,000 allied health cap is going to lead to a fall in living standards for veterans. The government says that it will consult over the next 12 months.
The consultation should have happened before the budget; unfortunately, it didn't. Now the government is playing catch-up, as it always does. House prices are plummeting right across the board, in every market.
Both regional and metropolitan house prices are falling. And we've seen the biggest slump in property values in four years. That's simply not good enough, particularly for somebody who purchased a property just prior to the budget, when they wouldn't have expected or thought about what was going to happen during the budget, given what the government said and the promises the Prime Minister made before the election.
The Prime Minister promised one thing, and the Treasurer delivered another. And this is at a time when construction companies are going bankrupt in record numbers. Not only are construction companies going bankrupt but also building approvals declined 1.1 per cent in May, and that's the third successive monthly fall on Labor's watch.
It's simply not good enough. Then we look at the transport sector. We've got trucking companies going bankrupt and backwards at a rate that we haven't seen for some time.
When you've got a group such as Don Watson closing after operating for 77 years, and Ron Crouch Transport in Wagga Wagga, a generational family trucking company, going into administration, it's simply not good enough. Transport operators are becoming insolvent in alarming numbers. It's not just that.
In Victoria just this year we've had four caravan manufacturers also go into administration. What is happening? But we hear the Minister for Small Business going on and on about how good things are for small business.
Well, they're not; they're simply not. The Future Made in Australia manufacturing policy that Labor spruiks is just a fallacy. It is just a joke.
We've got forestry products being imported at a rate never seen before because we are locking up our regeneration—our forestry sectors. When you have local economies such as Snowy Valleys Council, where 70 per cent of its gross shire product relies on forestry, and then you've got a government doing so much to inhibit and stop forestry happening, it is just a joke.
We've heard so much about child care because it's 1 July. Good luck in regional Australia, where there's a childcare desert. We've heard the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors in the last couple of question times—yesterday and the day before—going on about home-care packages.
They're simply so hard to get that people are dying waiting for them. It's not good enough. Then we've got the rorting in the NDIS.
Yes, the government said it's doing something about it, but you talk to NDIS operators, particularly in regional Australia—but more importantly, perhaps, those families who are so vulnerable and the children expecting those services that cannot get those services. Yes, we need to clamp down on shoddy operators, but it's not the shoddy operators who are going to miss out.
It's the vulnerable children. We can be so much better than this. We should be so much better than this.
We must be so much better than this.