Questions Without Notice: Take Note of Answers

Senator GROGAN: I have just ticked over seven hours sitting in this chamber today, for a variety of reasons. What I have heard—

Senator Dean Smith: What do you think you've achieved?

Senator GROGAN: Thank you for that interjection, Senator Smith. I am sure you think you're funny. What I have heard—and I'm hearing it again now—is an awful lot of disrespect for this chamber and how things operate. We have seen a pretty disgraceful act this afternoon. We have the Greens political party, who only support Palestine, and we have the coalition, who only support Israel. There's no congruence here. The arguments going on over the last number of hours should, I think, cause everyone to spend a little bit of time reflecting deeply on how that played out. The bottom line for us over here in the Labor government is that we believe in peace. We believe in a two-state solution. An awful lot of the politics and the pointscoring that's gone on here is something that we should all be deeply, deeply ashamed of. This chamber is where we get to debate, but to debate you have to listen as well as put forward your view. I'm not sure we've seen a lot of that today. But as we tick around to the last three-quarters of an hour of this sitting session, I will say that one of the things that is really important is how Australians are faring. We know that in the budget there was a whole bunch of really positive announcements. Those opposite have proven in the last 20 minutes that either they don't understand how finance and how budgets work or they're actually just pointscoring and playing politics. I'm going to go with the second one, because I'm pretty sure some of them are actually quite intelligent. But that's just me feeling benevolent on a Thursday afternoon. This week—the first week of July, the new financial year—we have seen five different types of cost-of-living help coming from the May budget, one being a tax cut for every taxpayer, one being energy bill relief for every household and one being cheaper medicines, as well as pay rise for millions of workers on award wages and two extra weeks of paid parental leave. In the Labor government, we are about structural reform that will last the distance, not a sugar hit—not a couple of hundred bucks in people's pockets on 1 July in the hope that they'll vote for you next time. Our task, and one we take very seriously, is structural change and building the budget to a stronger position into the future—and that's what we're doing, and that is how we are going to move forward. The other thing that builds into that, very strongly, is our Future Made in Australia, where we are looking at investing in those industries of the future so that we can see Australia getting stronger, our economy getting stronger, more and more opportunities for people to get good, well-paying jobs in industries that they really want to work in that they can be proud of, as we work together as a nation to build a sustainable future that will provide opportunities for our children and our grandchildren. I know for a fact that in Port Augusta, a region where I spend quite a lot of time, there are so many fantastic opportunities in green steel, in green cement. These aren't just pipedreams; these are things for which there are tangible plans in place, things where there are tangible opportunities that are being brought forward by the South Australian government and the amazing councils of the Spencer Gulf region. They've got excellent ideas to capture the ideas and the vision that the Albanese Labor government is putting forward to the country. That is being embraced, as they know the benefits of making structural change in our budgets, building our industry for the future, having more opportunities for our kids, and having more opportunities for people to build strong careers where they can earn better wages and live in a better, more robust, sustainable nation.