Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are hurting. As I get around Australia and as I get around my own electorate, I ask, 'How are you feeling versus a year ago?' I get a very consistent answer. They feel poorer, because they all know they have rising mortgage costs, they have rising fuel bills, they have rising prices at the checkout and they have rising taxes. For everything they buy, goods or services, they know they are paying more under this government.

We know a typical hardworking Australian family trying to get ahead is $25,000 a year worse off than a year ago. Finding that in after-tax income is a monumental feat, and we have to pay tribute to those hardworking Australians who we know are working more hours and digging harder into their savings because this government has given up the ghost when it comes to fighting inflation. They talk the talk but they never walk the walk, and any attempt they have made to put together a plan to fight inflation has failed at the first hurdle. We have a Treasurer right now who is more interested in banning cheques and writing 6,000-word essays than he is in fighting inflation. This Treasurer is a doctor of spin, not a doctor of economics, and it is showing, because we have seen his budget fail within a month.

I draw your attention to page 56 of Budget Paper No. 1, which talks about interest rates, and it highlights the expectations that interest rates would 'remain at 3.85 per cent until early 2024', from which time they will fall. This was in the budget in May, but, in just a few short weeks, we saw that fall apart, with interest rates going up to 4.1 per cent, and we have an expectation now from economists and the markets that we'll see further rate rises into the future. And it is no coincidence that this happened immediately after the budget, because the budget failed. It didn't deliver on the promises it made, and this is what we are seeing from this government time and time again, whether it's energy prices, the budget or mortgage costs. They make the promises and then they walk away and don't take responsibility.

Just last week we saw the national accounts come out. What we saw in that was that the Australian economy, on top of the fact that we have raging inflation and rising interest rates, is shuddering to a halt. For the last quarter, we saw GDP grow at 0.2 per cent. Here's where it gets very real, because it's GDP per person that counts. That's what people feel, and that has stopped. It's going backwards. We have a government here that is overseeing an economy it inherited that was strong. It is now shattering to a halt. Australians are now working more hours in a week, in a day, than they have since 1978. That's what they have to do to make ends meet. They're digging deep, because that's what Australians do. Australians are resilient, but they need to be resilient in the face of this government. They have to fight hard just to hold things together.

As I said, we've seen Australians saving less. In just a year, we've also seen a total collapse of labour productivity under this Labor government. In the last 12 months alone, labour productivity dropped by 4.6 per cent—and that's negative! Under the previous government, we saw an 11 per cent gain in labour productivity across our time in government. Almost half of that was wiped out in a single year under this government. It's no wonder that Philip Lowe, the Reserve Bank governor, using polite central banker speak that he does, is saying, 'Hey, under those circumstances, I have no choice; I have to raise interest rates.' That's what this government is delivering, and it needs to take responsibility for the situation.

You would have thought that with that kind of collapse in productivity, the Treasurer or the Prime Minister would show some interest in finding out more about it. But it turns out that the Treasurer, having seen the Productivity Commission bring down one of its most important reports—every five years it reports on productivity and brings out thousands of pages in that report—has not even bothered to meet with the chairman of the Productivity Commission. He hasn't even bothered to talk to him! He hasn't even bothered to do it. The truth of the matter is that this government doesn't care. It is all politics, not policy, because the Treasurer, as I say, is a doctor of spin, not a doctor of economics.

It is important to look at how Australia is doing versus the rest of the world. The Prime Minister likes to talk about this, but it's important to go to the facts. The facts are that Australia has a core inflation rate—which is the number that economists look at—running at 6.6 per cent. In the March quarter, we saw the US at 5.6 per cent, we saw Canada at 4.3 per cent and we saw the Euro Area at 5.7 per cent. In fact, we see Australia leading the world in exactly the wrong way. I am not always inclined to quote ABC Fact Check. On this one, I will. They have made it very clear that Australia is leading the world in exactly the wrong way.

If you look at historical comparisons—which those opposite love to do—between our time in office and this government's time in office, the average inflation rate over the coalition's nine years in office was 1.85 per cent. The average inflation rate over the first four quarters of the Labor government is over seven per cent. The average cash rate over the coalition's nine years in office was 1.34 per cent. After one year of Labor, it has risen to 4.1 per cent. As I said earlier, across our nine years in government, labour productivity increased by 11 per cent and total factor productivity increased by five per cent. In one year alone, we've seen a minus 4.6 per cent collapse in labour productivity.

I'm glad the member for Parramatta is here because he understands that, if you have that kind of productivity loss and you want to deliver higher prosperity to Australians, you simply can't do it. This is a catastrophic collapse, and it's a catastrophic collapse under this Labor government. When you look at what's behind it, we know that inflation is coming from Canberra. It's not coming from the Kremlin. From this government, we saw $185 billion of additional spending in this budget—$2 of additional discretionary spending for every dollar of saving. We've seen economist after economist say that the most generous thing you can say about this budget from Labor in terms of fiscal policy is that it hasn't helped. Well, they promised that they were going to fight inflation first, and that's not what we've seen. We're seeing industrial relations productivity. They are taking us back to the toxic industrial relations environment of the seventies and the eighties. That's showing up in the numbers.

Former productivity commissioner Gary Banks has told the AFR:

The current flurry of regulatory changes, under the banners of 'getting wages moving', 'job security' and 'equality', are likely to impede the flexibility and 'dynamism' that is integral to productivity growth and higher real wages—

which are what we want to see. But the former productivity commissioner says that Labor is going in exactly the wrong direction. On the release of the Productivity Commission report:

… he depicted it merely as 'an addition to the debate'—

talking about the Treasurer—

with little indication of areas to be followed up.

The current stance by the government is looking—

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