address to parliament - PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS - Economy

I remind the member for Hawke that the Liberals did not govern, cannot govern, without the National Party. I don't know how many references he made to the Liberals, but there's the Nationals too! The reason he ignored the National Party is that he's a new member. He's in a new seat, the seat of Hawke, to the north and north-west of Melbourne. He comes to this place with that city-centric view. They don't understand, those metropolitan members, the value of regional areas and the value of the Nationals in those regional areas.

It was those regional areas that carried productivity. It was those regional areas that carried the economy. It was those regional areas that carried the nation through COVID, through those dark days. We saw that, in the United States of America, they were burying people on Manhattan Island in an unprecedented situation. In Italy, they were putting coffins in churches because the morgues were filled to overflowing with people who had, tragically, passed away from that worldwide pandemic. That did not happen in Australia, and that did not happen because the Liberals and the Nationals made sure that we had our health system right, that we kept the doors of business open and that we kept workers in jobs.

I get tired of and I get angry at the fact that those members opposite come into this place time and time again and say, 'What did we get from a trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt?' It's wrong. The figure is nowhere near a trillion dollars. I'll tell you what we got from the debt that has been incurred. We made sure that tens of thousands of people are alive today who would not otherwise be contributing to the economy and who would not otherwise be alive. We saved people's lives. We put health first and we made sure that the economy was strong. Coming out of COVID, jobs went up and productivity went up.

Looking at this motion which has been brought to this place by the member for Forde, we see that the latest national accounts data shows that we have the biggest slump, the biggest decline, the greatest fall, in labour productivity since records began—and that's now. That's on this government's watch. That's on Labor's watch. In the first year of the Albanese government, productivity growth has dropped to a historic low of minus—that's negative—4.6 per cent. What a shame.

I heard the member for Moreton talk about skills and women in the workforce. Let's just have a look at the figures. Under the coalition, there were 815,600 female business operators. That's from August 2021 figures. There were 220,000 trade apprentices, a record high, and 11½ million Australians were benefiting from tax relief. Real wages were stronger and higher than they are at the moment. I know those opposite talk about wages, but, when you talk about wages, you talk about what you can do with the money that you earn. At the moment, what people are doing with the money that they earn is paying higher grocery prices and higher power bills. The member for Fairfax knows this well. He's prosecuting the case for energy relief, and yet we see in the member for Hawke's own state of Victoria a government so bereft of vision and so bereft of policy ideas that they have not only cancelled the Commonwealth Games but, worse than that, banned gas. 'No, you can't have gas in a new home.' Heaven forbid you turn a kitchen appliance on with gas in the future—go figure!

We had gas, we had iron ore and we had coal, which were pushing up productivity, jobs and balance of payments and which kept the economy going. What does this Labor government at both the federal and state level want to do? They want to shut the whole show down. That's what Labor does: they shut the whole shown down—'Who cares how much people are paying?' The sorts of things that Labor members are talking about have nothing to do with the sorts of things that people are talking about at barbecues, at their churches and at their sporting contests on the weekend. Shame, Labor.