Mr MITCHELL (McEwen—Second Deputy Speaker) (16:03): It is interesting that today on this MPI the government could not even provide its economic team here to argue its point. Ms Henderson: Excuse me. What am I? Mr MITCHELL: What are you? Gee whiz, we could go for an hour there, but calling you an economic expert is something that I would not do, because that would be misleading the House. So we will not do that. Ms Henderson: Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Mr MITCHELL: You cannot call a point of order on that. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Broadbent ): It is robust. Opposition members interjecting— Mr MITCHELL: It is very much a glass jaw on the backbench over there—definitely. When the now Prime Minister rolled Tony Abbott, he said, 'We're going to have a new style of leadership—good government, sound policy, advocacy not slogans. We will respect the intelligence of the Australian people.' Fine words, you might say, but you have to have a look at what they have done. The thing that we have learned over the last six months is that they have no control over what they are doing. You have the Prime Minister say one thing in the morning and one thing in the afternoon. His office clarifies and then the next day his Assistant Treasurer is out there and she obviously has not read the talking points that are available to everyone, because she gets it wrong as well. Let us have a look at what we have had under the government. We have gross debt now over $400 billion. The first thing they did when they came into government was to remove the debt ceiling. They did not want to have to come into this place and stand up and say why they were increasing this nation's debt. What they have done is doubled it. Gross debt is now up 47.2 per cent since this lot were elected—the so-called economic wizards, the people that claim that they are the great looker-afters of the Australian economy. We have seen net debt up 57 per cent. It has gone up $274 billion since they got elected. We can have a look at the NBN. Of course, it is now not the NBN; it is the MTM, the Malcolm Turnbull mess. It is failing everywhere. People cannot get access to it. It is not working. It was going to be cheaper and it was going to be better, but what have we seen? A slowed-down rollout. 'We've taken away fibre-optic, because now we're going to use copper, because that's what we used at the turn of the last century.' That is why we see that it has now gone out to a $56 billion cost. We have had them come in here and say that everyone was going to have access to the National Broadband Network by 2016. Lo and behold, they cannot do it. As usual they overreach, overpromise and underdeliver. That is the worst thing you can do when you are in sales. Ms Henderson: Sales? Mr MITCHELL: Well, it is sales. You are selling a policy, but you have not got a policy. Ms Henderson: We are delivering. Mr MITCHELL: You couldn't deliver a pizza on a cold night—fair dinkum! Let's be serious here. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for McEwen, when you use the word 'you', you are reflecting on the chair, and, as a former salesman, I am embarrassed! Mr MITCHELL: I respect that. I certainly think that you personally could deliver a pizza. I have no doubt about that, Mr Deputy Speaker. You are more capable perhaps than your colleague over there. The Mobile Black Spot Program was going to be the great solver of communications in the bush. What we saw was nothing more than an exercise in pork-barrelling. The government came out with three criteria: rural and regional areas, mobile phone black spots and areas prone to natural disaster. When we look at areas that meet those criteria, what do we see? In McEwen, where we have three national highways, and 60 per cent of the electorate has been burnt out by fires in the last six years, we got one tower and one upgrade. But what about other areas? The now Deputy Prime Minister's area was pork-barrelled to the tune of 28. Go back and have a look at the stats on natural disasters in this area. They are very small. But here we have an electorate such as mine, which suffers every single year from bushfires, and floods chucked in there as well, and the government sits there and says, 'It doesn't qualify for the mobile phone black spot towers.' We have seen 17,000 families now losing their family tax benefit A in McEwen, because this government—fair dinkum—could not hold a chook raffle in a pub. It is unbelievable that each and every day we come in here and we know that because of the incompetence of the government $43 million a day is being paid, in interest, on government debt that they doubled and they created in 2½ years. You can change the salesman, as they have done, but the policies are still as bad. (Time expired)