Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about the cost of living in regional and remote communities of the Northern Territory, and the failure of the previous government to act and assist these families and communities.

The towns and communities in my electorate are reeling under the extraordinary rise in the cost of everyday living. Regional and remote Australia is always an expensive place to live; we don't have the economies of scale of large cities and we have huge distances to contend with. But when this was exacerbated by nine years of neglect by the previous government, battlers in my electorate suffered. Access to fresh produce is becoming unaffordable to the average person, as food in remote communities is 56 per cent more expensive than in regional supermarkets due to long supply chains and poor-quality roads, as outlined by the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory. Every lettuce for sale at the Kintore Store, near the border with WA, or at Aputula Store, near the South Australian border, has travelled hundreds of kilometres on unsealed and unsafe roads. Trucking companies have to charge more to cover repairs and fix breakages. Even the Santa Teresa Road, only 80 kilometres from Alice Springs, is a terrible access road. And, despite the urgings of the former member for Lingiari, the previous government refused to seal it. I am proud to be able to tell residents that the Albanese government will deliver in terms of this road.

If you continue travelling about 700 kilometres west of Santa Teresa to Docker River, on the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, the negative impact of the cost-of-living crisis is laid bare. Here you can expect to pay $9.60 for two litres of milk, three times more than you would pay in Alice Springs. We had a government in power for nine long years, and I have sat here and listened to their MPI, which is a matter of public importance. I have listened to every member on the opposition benches, who suddenly have amnesia. They ignored this for nine years. They had a deliberate strategy of wage suppression as part of their economic strategy, and kept workers' pay as low as possible. Of course if you do that you end up with situations where people in these communities need to make unimaginable sacrifices: do I pay for my medicine or do I pay for my child to eat? This is an everyday reality for families in Lingiari that the coalition government created through their neglect of the poorest Australians. Blaming poor people for being poor, which is what the previous government's CDP program did, doesn't help them pay for the lettuce or the milk—or the retail, for that matter. What matters is real jobs in communities, real skill development and award wages at a minimum for hardworking people. That is what the Albanese Labor government will be doing with its review of the failed CDP program.

My constituents on Christmas Island and the Cocos Keeling Islands are really suffering at the hands of Australia's cost-of-living crisis, as they were already contending with air freight costs adding $12 per kilogram to their fresh food prices. There is a massive systemic problem with sea freight systems servicing the Indian Ocean territories. The backlog for freight is in the order of 15 to 20 tonnes and the prices are spiralling as a result. How do we expect people to live in these territories when fresh produce is becoming unattainable to everyone? But this isn't an issue that has just come up today; this was an issue that the previous government knew about, but they took no action to address the root causes of these issues. It is a difficult problem, but I am proud to be part of a government that recognises that this is an issue, and we will take action.

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