MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator TYRRELL (Tasmania) (16:55): I thank Senator McKim for his motion, but this government is focused on delivering more real change—not arguing about how things are owned. From 1 July: lower taxes, higher pay, a fair go for all; another tax cut for every taxpayer—part of five rounds which will leave the average worker up to $2,800 a year better off. A new thousand-dollar instant tax deduction was introduced to deliver lower, simpler taxes for 6.2 million workers.

Payday super began, increasing the retirement incomes of millions of Australians. Price gouging by supermarkets has been banned—thank God for that! Paid parental leave is expanded to a full six months.

Around 2.6 million Australians have benefited from regular indexation of social security payment rates and thresholds. Medicare urgent care clinics have become a permanent part of Medicare. Record public hospital funding began flowing under a new five-year agreement with states and territories.

More broadly, we've done a heap to help with the cost of living. We have done cheaper child care for more than one million families; cheaper medicines, saving Australians $2.6 billion; three days of guaranteed subsidised early education for an additional 100,000 families; Free TAFE has 800,000 enrolments; the largest increase in rent assistance in 30 years; student debt relief for more than three million Australians; and more bulk-billing with an extra 1,400 GP clinics and 3,800 bulk-billing practices in total.

Yes, we can have a conversation about privatisation or public owned services, but what really matters is delivering for people. Any organisation can fail or have bad management, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately owned. Look no further than the useless attempts by the Tasmanian Liberal state government.

After 12 years of useless government, Tasmanians are sick of the roundabout of neglect and then deflect. Only a Labor government will take public services seriously, and deliver these services properly, to deliver real change for Australians and Tasmanians. Tasmanians are sick of being told by Liberal governments that they know how to run public assets, and then watching them prove the absolute opposite.

Let's start with the TT-Line. That's a publicly owned company. Our ferries.

Our port. What did the Tasmanian government do with it? They spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building two new Spirit of Tasmania ferries—ferries that were too big for the berth Tasmania actually had ready for them.

What galactically stupid failure! A $90 million upgrade turned into nearly $500 million. Those ships sat parked—one in Scotland, one in Geelong—burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars a month for a service Tasmanians couldn't even use.

All up, they spent more than $700 million above what they told us it would cost. A deputy premier lost his job over it. That's not what public ownership failing looks like; that's what incompetence, wearing a public ownership costume, looks like.

Then there's TasInsure. The Liberals went to an election promising Tasmanians a real state owned insurer, something to actually take on a market that was taking the piss out of families and small businesses. They got elected on it.

And then they quietly gutted it into a statutory authority that doesn't insure anyone. It just sits alongside the same insurers it was meant to challenge. Tasmania's public hospitals are also being crippled under the Liberal state government, despite the Labor federal government providing them with record funding.

All the gear and no idea. Being told not to come to the LGH in Launnie because there are not enough beds—that isn't good enough. Tasmanians are sick of their basic services not being up to scratch because of the state Liberals being useless at delivering.

This isn't an argument against public ownership. Tasmanians still believe our ferries, our insurance, our essential services should belong to us, but you can't run public ownership on training wheels and thought bubbles. The state Liberal government is clearly not fit to run and look after Tasmanians.

Let's stop flogging a dead horse. Give Tasmania a government that actually knows how to manage what it owns, because this Liberal state government has proven time and time again it can't. We need change.

We need a Labor state government that values Tasmanians and delivers the public service that they deserve.