MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (16:18): When the MPI arrived, I got to read it, and then I read it again. Then I read it again— Mr Buchholz: I'm going to interject the whole way through! The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): Member for Wright.
Order! Mr MATT SMITH: and it wasn't actually a complete sentence. It was a noun phrase.
It lacked a verb, and this is a problem. Mr Buchholz interjecting— The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Wright, we're not having a debate here. You heard me call order to the other side; now I'm calling order to you.
Mr MATT SMITH: The lack of verb made the reading a bit awkward, a bit difficult. That's pernickety, but in this place details matter. Details are an important part of things.
For example, if you're going to celebrate a surplus, make sure you get a surplus. If you're going to promote nuclear power, then make sure that the technology that you want to use actually exists—small details. But the reality of it is the details will get lost.
Things are wild at the moment. The world has been going through, for the last 10 years or so, unheard-of change. None of us were ready for COVID.
Everyone who was a parent, who understood homeschooling for the first time in their lives, who didn't prepare their youngest child for what it's like to not go to school after building them up to go to school—I think my youngest daughter was five. What it felt like, as a parent, to feel like you were failing them every day as you were trying to balance work from home and looking after the kids—what the fear felt like.
Then, when everything opened back up again, we thought it was going to be okay, but inflation was high. If you stop something that is moving, it takes a while to start it back up again. The world economy stopped.
It takes a while to start it back up again, and there are going to be knock-on effects to that as everything ramps straight back up again. Anyone who's tried to start up an old diesel tractor will know that as a fact. So we're working through it, we're making progress, we're getting better—and a war happens in Iran, and the thing that we are most dependent on gets taken away.
The diesel skyrockets, impacting right across the economy. It now costs more money to move things around. It costs more money to build plastics.
It costs more money for fertiliser. It has impacted absolutely everywhere. You've got to tackle these things head on.
Nothing here works in a vacuum. We have to acknowledge what's happening in the rest of the world. We have to acknowledge the challenges that the last decade have produced and what they mean going forwards.
What that means is that we need to take action, and that is what this government is doing, not just on the economy but all around us. I grew up before mobile phones. It was lovely.
If somebody called your house, they didn't ask where you were. They knew because you were in your house and you had answered the phone. There was no tracking, and if you weren't in your house you didn't get the call.
Perfect. Now we have Facebook, Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter. It follows us around everywhere.
It follows our children. It attacks our children. It is designed specifically to addict and keep.
There's an old saying: if you don't know what the product is, you are the product. These tech giants have turned our children and, dare I say it, have probably turned a lot of us into the product. So when we try to make things better, when we have to take responsibility, as a government, it starts in the economy, but it also has to include humanity.
The digital duty of care will protect our children. I did not raise a product. I raised two beautiful daughters who I am proud of.
I think everybody in here is also proud of and loves their children. They are not products to be sold. They are not products to be bought.
They are not products to be exploited. Our responsibility to the next generation includes fixing the housing market, giving young people that opportunity to have what my parents had so that they're not priced out and that they can see that hope. Every single young person I speak to who comes through my office or comes to this place speaks of hope.
They speak of hope because they see this government making steps that will make this world a better place for them. They care deeply about climate change. They care deeply about their freedoms.
They care deeply about their economic opportunities. And they know, inherently, that this Labor government is on their side, will back them in and will get it done. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The time for this discussion has concluded.