Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I think it's a bit rich of the member for Blair to come in and lecture us when our communities are some of the poorest communities across Australia. We're here representing them, and when he says that we don't have bums on seats in an MPI, I'd just ask him to think back to over 10 months ago, when Labor was putting MPIs on in here and it was very, very sparse.

But I will talk to the MPI. I think it's very appropriate that it's brought on today because, just like my friend and colleague from Riverina, across my electorate I am seeing increasing numbers of people going to places like Vinnies and Lifeline and calls to Lifeline from people who are so distressed about the cost of living, the cost of electricity and the cost of their mortgages, and they don't know where to turn to. For all the smoke and mirrors that we've seen from Labor over the past 10 months, they keep going up. Now, I will give credit to where credit is due. There has been a decrease in the cost of medicine and there have been more childcare places—or, I should say, childcare fees. But not everybody has a child in child care; not everybody is on medicines. We need real, tangible policy to force down the cost of living—real, tangible policy to allow people some comforts of life.

I spoke recently about pensioners—a couple in South West Rocks who wrote to me out of despair. Both of them are on the pension and noted they received a $44 a fortnight increase recently. Well, their power bill has just gone up by 44 per cent. That equates to half of what the increase in the pension was. On top of that, add the increases in the cost of fuel, the cost of groceries and the cost of almost everything. I'll give you some examples. We are now paying 12.2 per cent more for bread and cereal products, 8.5 per cent more for fruit and vegetables, a whopping 14.9 per cent more for dairy products and 8.2 per cent more for meat and seafood. What that is doing is forcing people away from fresh food to tinned food. They're not buying meat and they're going without. They're hurting out there, and what we are hearing from Labor is this rhetoric that, while the opposition are voting against everything—guess what?—nothing has worked. Nothing is working. Prices keep going up. Electricity prices keep going up. We know this because there's going to be another increase of another 25 per cent from Origin from 1 July. How are these people going to cope?

Stop blaming us and start doing your job. Start implementing policies that actually work, rather than launching headlong into ideology and renewables that aren't there now. We are all for renewables, but they're not there now. This ideology of no more gas and no more coal is pushing everything through the roof. You look at us and you say, 'You don't care.' Well, we could say that about you. You don't care about the public. You're not implementing any solutions to ease that pain, to stop people having to go to Lifeline and to stop people having to go to Vinnies.

Let me talk about the tax on the truckies. Where do you think that's going to flow to? That's right: the little people—those same people from South West Rocks, those same people from Dorrigo who can't pay their bills now. They can't pay their electricity bills. It's just going to flow on. It'll flow on to the consumer. It'll flow on to the customer. They will be the ones it will flow on to. It will be your constituents saying, 'Guess what? That tax that you imposed on the truckies is hurting us.' Do your job and help your constituents.

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