13 April 2022, National Press Club, Canberra, Australia

Journalist: Just very quickly, talking about fact checking exercises, you said in the speech that wages growth wasn’t going particularly well, what’s the current WPI?

I am sick …. I am sick …. If you want to know why people are turning off politics, it’s because what happens when you have an election that increasingly becomes this basic fact-checking exercise between a government that deserves to be turfed out and an opposition that’s got no vision.

This is what happens. Elections should be about a contest of ideas.

Politics should be about reaching for the stars and offering a better society. And instead, and instead, there’s these questions that are asked ‘can you tell us this particular stat’ or ‘can you tell us that particular stat?’

And those questions are designed to show that politicians are somehow out of touch and not representative of everyday people.

Well newsflash, most people in Canberra are on six figure salaries, just passing time until they go out and work for the coal or gas companies, and get a six or seven figure lobbying job.

Do you know what would be a better way of showing that politicians are in touch with the need of everyday people? It would be passing laws that lift the minimum wage. It would be making dental and mental into Medicare.

It would be making sure that we wipe student debt and build affordable houses.

And when you’ve got wages growing at about 2 per cent and inflation at 3 and a half per cent, that is the part of the problem.

And I hope that at this election, we can lift the standard and turn it into a genuine contest of ideas.