Peter Dutton visits Cougar Mining Equipment

Peter Dutton visits Cougar Mining Equipment at Tomago in the seat of Paterson

Transcript

00:00Lawrence, thank you very much. Great to be here with you and with Emma as well. Thank you very

00:03much Maria for being here as well. I want to start by saying thank you very much to Chad and the

00:09entire team here at Cougar. I think it's a great Australian success story and employing 600 people,

00:16providing jobs not just to the 600 but to all of the subcontractors and others through the

00:22supply line. Probably another 800 families benefit because of this operation here and as

00:28Lawrence pointed out to talk to the apprentices as well. I thought it was a real opportunity to

00:34hear from them and some of the challenges that people are facing at the moment. It's a tough

00:39situation for many families across the country at the moment. The Prime Minister promised before

00:44the last election on 97 occasions that power prices would go down by $275. Instead they've

00:50gone up by $1,300 and the Prime Minister keeps saying that he'll dish out $150 each quarter or

00:56every six months but that won't last beyond the election. Australians know that they have been

01:02going backwards under this government and the Prime Minister has walked away today from his

01:06commitment to the $275 reduction. Jim Chalmers won't even say the word and it demonstrates that

01:13you can't trust this Prime Minister in terms of what he says before an election compared to what

01:17he does after. There is a lot of debt that's been run up by this government, $1.2 trillion,

01:22as we saw in the budget papers and that is going to be paid for by the next generation,

01:29$125,000 per household. That is a very significant debt. It's going to make it

01:34harder for future governments to provide support and to cut taxes and provide all of the services

01:41that Australians would want from their government. But that's what's happened.