MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr TAYLOR (Hume—Leader of the Opposition) (15:25): I've noted that the Prime Minister still hasn't published his speech that he made to business leaders on Monday night. He hasn't published it, and I think I know from the noise I hear from behind me that we know why. It's because the Prime Minister used his speech to tell them that he had overruled the Treasurer.
You can see it now: the Prime Minister, in all his arrogance—the saviour, the hero, the white knight—personally intervening, delaying the tax office's absurd ban on credit cards for small businesses, countermanding his treasurer and not stepping back but stepping in, showing who's in charge. He mogged the Treasurer. That's what he did.
He showed the Treasurer who wears the pants in the relationship. That's what he did. You would have to be living on Mars not to see the rift in the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer.
The Treasurer wasn't here today, but—I'll tell you what—the Prime Minister looked very happy not having the Treasurer here today. He looked very happy calling the Assistant Treasurer to come forth and cover for his hapless minister for small business. He did it on multiple occasions.
I am tempted to liken this to the Hawke-Keating rift, but it would be an insult to compare two economic heavyweights—I'll make that concession with Hawke and Keating—to the complete lightweights we have in the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. In question time, Labor's Caesar and Pompey are putting on quite a show—the forced smiles, the contrived statements of unanimity.
You see the Treasurer looking down at his phone when the Prime Minister has to answer why he shouldn't sack his hapless treasurer. Even the doctor of spin can't spin away his ruptured relationship with the Prime Minister. He can't do it.
Even this truth-twisting prime minister can't reframe the relationship between the two. It's not just the Prime Minister and the Treasurer who are at loggerheads. Cabinet ministers are leaking.
Backbenchers are speaking out. The member for Parramatta, today, was out. The Attorney-General was out.
Lefty is turning on lefty, and there's nothing like lefty turning on lefty. There is nothing like it. It is back to the future, because I see it all over again.
The Rudd-Gillard years are happening all over again. Most importantly, Australians are seeing the wheels falling off the wagon with this government. What a shocking week for the government.
The Federal Court overturned the Minister for the Environment and Water's decision on the Blayney gold mine—a decision that should never have been made, wrecking a great town in central western New South Wales, taking away the future of that town. A court has overruled that decision—a humiliation for the government. Yesterday, there was yet another embarrassment, when the Senate rightly banded together to overturn the decision this government had made to hurt the over-65s by taking away their support for private health insurance.
But it's worse: that proposal was going to hurt every Australian by adding to congestion in the public health system. We've fought long and hard against Labor's mean-spirited cash grab. There have been other shockers this week.
The government distributed $300,000 to an Islamist extremist media company that has been spewing hatred against Australian Jews—absolute shame. Then there's the government's abhorrent legislation to put a tax on trusts. These are the very hardest working Australians.
They don't get what employees get. They don't get a fixed income. They have to earn every single dollar they earn.
This government wants to punish the tradies, the truckies, the farmers, the pharmacists, the cafe and restaurant owners, the builders—who build this country, who make this country what it is. Now, if the hopeless minister for small business actually visited some small businesses instead of spending $150,000 on overseas jaunts, she would appreciate that hundreds of thousands of Australian small businesses use that structure for flexibility because they need it.
They are working harder than ever for less than ever. That is the reality, and we hear it every single day. I was with Tiffany today in Garran; she owns a cafe there.
She is working seven days a week, every single week, and this government punishes her and every other small-business person in the country with its decisions. Now, the wheels are falling off the wagon. Will the Prime Minister dump the Treasurer, or will the Treasurer dump the Prime Minister—or will there be a complete clean-out?
I think the Assistant Treasurer is waiting for his opportunity. The members for Hindmarsh and Parramatta, as well as the Assistant Treasurer—they're strutting their stuff. He was out there today; we saw him.
He's about to do it again! I don't know where the member for Parramatta is. I'd have thought he'd be doing a bit of an audition today as well.
The sad reality is that it doesn't matter who's in the chair. You're going to get the same policies every single time, where we see government spending at a 40-year high outside of the pandemic, fuelling inflation; 16 interest rate increases; 30 business failures a day; everything costing more—groceries, mortgages, insurance, you name it; the worst collapse in living standards in the developed world; power bills skyrocketing 40 per cent—still waiting for that $275.
They came down 10 per cent when I was minister. I got the runs on the board, but there are no runs on the board from this hapless minister for climate change and energy. Confidence smashed, enterprise obstructed, investment hindered, productivity back five per cent—that means Australians are working five per cent harder for the same they were getting 4½ years ago.
This is the reality of modern Australia: managed decline by this government. Well, there's a better way. That means axing Labor's toxic taxes, red tape and waste—their tax on small businesses, on houses, capital gains.
It means getting rid of the waste of this government—a trillion dollars of debt, green hydrogen. Even the energy minister's admitted it was a mirage—$7 billion a year of mirage. There's the red tape—2,000 pages in the National Construction Code, telling a builder how to build a house, adding $70,000 to the cost of building a house.
We'll scrap their net zero. We'll scrap that energy minister with it because he's been absolutely hopeless. We will dig and drill for our coal and our oil in this country—and uranium.
We will raise the moratorium on nuclear in this country. We will end Labor's mass migration and replace it with skilled migration. We've never seen anything like it: 1.5 million people in four years—the population of Adelaide.
At the end of that, small businesses still can't get the people they need. Those opposite are creating a guest worker economy—three million people on temporary visas, up almost a million since they came to government. We will change that.
We will oversee the end of bridging visas, which are being exploited in this country. We will make sure our universities are selling educational excellence, not visas, and we will put Australians first. We'll protect our flag, our national day, our statues, because we believe this is the greatest country on earth—it just doesn't feel like that for so many Australians right now.
Australia is worth fighting for, and we will fight every single day to get Australia back.