John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this matter of public of importance about the cost-of-living increases being imposed upon Australians, leading up to Christmas. But I do not think we should make the mistake of thinking that this is some Johnny-come-lately thing. It took three years of hard labour to get to this point. It was not done overnight. The current Prime Minister has been gleefully forging ahead in the big-spending, throwaway way in which she acted as a minister in government, and she still seems to be ploughing on with the same reckless abandon towards what those in the Australian public have to pay—interest rates on cars, interest rates on houses and, particularly, interest rates on small business. It is right there in front of us. After three short years, the government is continuing the rhetoric without the action.

There is one thing that every Australian does, no matter their background or which state or region they come from: we all eat. The one thing that will happen is that food prices will go up. Admittedly, in the course of the three years it has taken to get to this kind of pressure, we did have GroceryWatch, which we all remember. We do not hear a lot about it now. One of the things that the former Prime Minister said in ‘07 was, ‘We are going to bring down the cost of living.’ That was three short years ago. GroceryWatch is the only thing I noticed that was ever actually aimed at it, and that was no more successful than Fuelwatch. And fuel is probably the other thing that most Australians have to use as well.

I recall that, at one stage, they did try to pass off the pink batts as a way of dropping the cost of living. I am not quite sure how successful that was. Parts of that I do not want to talk about today, but certainly it cost a lot of money. It almost cost more money to try to fix than to do, and that was a heck of a lot. At the same time we had the school halls program. There might have been schools around Australia that were glad of it, and why would they not be? No-one knocks anything back that is free. The point that was missed by the minister in question time today was that the school halls cost about three times more than they should have. The reason I lock in the batts and school halls together is that it was a lot of money, a lot of borrowed money, which, as I recall, we were criticised for voting against.

There is one thing that we have to look at with the borrowing side of this issue as we run up to Christmas. The previous speaker mentioned the previous government. The previous government left this government in the best fiscal position of any government at any time in Australia’s history. And what have they managed to do to the position we left them in three short years of hard labour? What did happen? Not only did they spend the surplus we left them, I think they might have borrowed a little too. And now we are looking at a wonderful communications network. As with the school halls, people like something they get for nothing, but in actual fact they will still have to pay for the NBN. We are talking about $55 billion. The communications industry—not John Cobb, not me, not any of us—looked at the summary for this program and said ‘Whoops!’ Mind you, they have always been a bit amazed by the whole NBN proposal. The communications industry is now talking about $55 billion. That is okay. We will borrow a bit more. But the issue of all this borrowing is that the rest of us—the constituency of Australia—have to deal with it. If you come from where I do, you do have to deal with it—that is, retail sales have gone down. Even though we are now getting into the festive season, retail sales are going down out of sight. In towns where I come from, Bathurst and Orange, retail sales are shrinking rapidly. Why? Is it because the government have run up such a debt? The previous speaker spoke about interest rates. The government have managed to bring interest rates back to a situation where they are higher than at any time in the 11½ years of the previous government—and it has not taken this government long to do it.

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