Morrison Has Failed To Do His Job

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance: Australians know all too well the failure of this government to do their job. The only job they want to do is to do a job on one another, and we saw about 10 minutes ago breaking news from Channel 10 that the Prime Minister is about to do a job on one of his ministers. Whatever happened to the party of, 'If you have a go, you get a go'? After three years of this Prime Minister, we've gone from, 'If you have a go, you get a go', to, now, 'We have a job to do; I'm going to do mine and I need you to do yours.' Inspiring stuff! It's a bit like the slogan in Futurama, 'You gotta do what you gotta do'.

We went from Tony Abbott who—when he realised that things weren't going well for him—said, 'Good government starts today', to Malcolm Turnbull, who promised stable government about three years into his term. And now the Prime Minister is promising to 'do his job'. Wouldn't it be nice if he had realised that he had a job to do at the start of this pandemic, rather than when we are two and a bit years in? He started doing his job when people were telling him there was a crisis in aged care. He started doing his job when people—including trade unions—were telling him to order rapid antigen tests. If he had done his job when people from Pfizer were saying, 'We'd like to speak to you about getting vaccinations for the people in your country'—if only he had done his job. I'm worried that we are going to repeat mistakes again and again under this government.

We saw the strategy from this Prime Minister where, every time something went wrong, he would blame the states. And then we saw in question time today the new strategy: blame the nation-states. When he was asked about the increasing cost of beef in Australia, he blamed it on the situation in the Ukraine! Let's blame the nation-states. We know he likes to attack states—he has attacked the great state of Queensland many times and he attacks the great state of Western Australia on a regular basis. We've seen a number of times that he wants to attack Western Australia so much that he even writes a cheque to cover Clive Palmer 's court costs. It is disgraceful.

We then saw the Deputy Prime Minister today talking about 'the forgotten roads'. Well, what about the forgotten state? The Deputy Prime Minister talks about infrastructure projects in every state and territory except one: Western Australia. I would love to see the Deputy Prime Minister come to Western Australia. I dare him to visit during the campaign. I'm sure that the same exemptions, in fact, that were available to Minister Dutton are also available to the Deputy Prime Minister, so if he wants to come over he could.

Then we go to the never-ending digging into the essays, looking for this scrap—that is how hard this government has had to dig. Maybe it's that the Treasurer never said anything stupid when he was young—but he's making up for it now! This is a Treasurer described by the Australian Financial Review as 'lighter than helium', the same newspaper that revealed the member for Mackellar's plans for an inheritance tax. It is the only major party—this is the chair of the Economics Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister—calling for death duties. This is spectacular. But we know that this government actually likes to float a lot of different ideas about taxes. When the Prime Minister was Treasurer he put out a plan to increase the GST. He said that increasing the GST was an 'opportunity', but then he was told off—slapped down. But this government has successfully taxed young Australians, when it introduced a knowledge tax to jack up the price of university degrees for Western Australians and for Australians across the board.

Then we get back to this government's deep, decades-long, Liberal and National party entanglement with Clive Palmer. One of the jobs that this government doesn't do is that they never stand up against Clive Palmer. At the moment, there is—I can't talk about it—a defamation case in the courts where Clive Palmer and the Premier of Western Australia are battling it out. I can assure you if this: you will never see a member of this government being sued by Clive Palmer for defamation. They have never ever stood up to Clive Palmer and they never will, because he is helping them try to get re-elected. (Time expired)