STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator McDONALD (Queensland—Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (13:38): The Albanese government's recent backflips on public policy reveal why it is now considered to be the worst since the Whitlam government. Among the biggest backflips was Labor's most recent retreat from its proposal to slash Commonwealth disaster-recovery funding. Labor wanted to replace the longstanding arrangement—where Canberra contributes up to 75 per cent of eligible disaster recovery costs—with an incredibly unfair fifty-fifty split.

For Queensland, as Australia's most disaster-prone state, it would have been devastating. It would have shifted enormous costs onto remote councils, communities and ratepayers already struggling to recover from floods and cyclones. But Queensland councils refused to surrender.

All 77 councils joined the fight. They stood together. They kept the pressure on Canberra and refused to accept a policy that would punish communities and leave them worse off.

I congratulate those councils, their mayors and councillors, and the Local Government Association of Queensland. They demonstrated what local leadership can achieve, particularly given that their local Labor MPs were completely missing in action. Why weren't they fighting with the same determination?

Instead, these councils were exposed, first-hand, to the worst of Labor's Canberra-focused, autocratic and anti-regions approach to lawmaking. Labor was forced into another retreat recently over the Australian Tax Office's plans to stop accepting credit card payments, which was put on hold after an outcry from small business. Then there was Labor's extraordinary attempt to impose a $5,000 annual threshold on veterans' allied health treatments.

After fierce opposition from veterans and their advocates, Labor abandoned that proposal too. Australians are sick of these attacks and Labor's half-hearted attempts to make— (Time expired)