Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an undeniable reality that people across our communities are doing it tough—all across our economy, all across our country and in every state. The reality of that is not the government of the last 18 months. There have been a range of structural failings throughout the last decade when it comes to economic leadership in our country. To give you some flavour of that in terms of headline realities, we saw the worst productivity growth for half a century, under the last government. We saw a decade of real wage decline, and the worst part about that is that we of course know that that was, as the Liberals themselves say, a deliberate design feature of the economy over which they presided. We've seen our country saddled with a trillion dollars of Liberal debt. These are the preconditions that set up our economy and indeed set up our communities to suffer over this last period of time.

We know that the inflation problem, which has been such a key driver of the cost-of-living challenge facing our communities, was created and incubated under that former government. They failed utterly to invest in sovereign capability across our economy. They left us open to the international pressures that have ultimately thrust our economy into the high-inflation circumstances that it finds itself. To be fair, there are some international events that no government could necessarily have foreseen or necessarily managed the risks of—wars in both Europe and the Middle East chief amongst them. Nevertheless, what the former Liberal government did was design an economy and execute the policy settings for that economy that left our community so vulnerable and so exposed to those international pressures.

We know that inflation peaked under that former Liberal government. And, yes, our government has been very upfront, as has the Reserve Bank, in its independent role, about the need to drive that inflation down and the fact that it would take time and it would be challenging, and that there would be both monetary and fiscal policy elements to that effect. At the end of the day, our government has approached this challenge with our values at the centre of our policy treatment. What we want to do is build an economy that works for our people. We want Australian workers to earn more and keep more of what they earn. We know that that is the best way to alleviate that cost-of-living pressure on Australian households and to aid Australian families and workers in recovering from this difficult period.

Labor's tax cut plan, which we've been moving through the parliament with the very lukewarm support, I have to acknowledge, of the Liberals—they say publicly that they support our tax cuts, but they have frustrated at every opportunity the process of legislating them, and we know that they have spent a significant amount of time and energy undermining them within the broader community. Most notably, the deputy leader of the Liberal Party came out immediately to state that they would repeal tax cuts for Australian workers—roll them back.

In my community, these tax cuts are worth $1,428 to each average worker. In a household with two full-time workers on an average wage that's over $2,800 a year. That means that 73,000 taxpayers across my community, and the families and households that they support, will all get a tax cut. Every single taxpayer will get a tax cut, just as every single taxpayer across Australia will get a tax cut—that's 13.6 million Australians getting a tax cut and 73,000 just in my electorate alone.

When the Liberals stand up and make ridiculous, outrageous comments about the cost of living, Australians know that they don't truly understand or believe in addressing those matters and that they, ultimately, are accountable for the circumstances that created those conditions in the first place. Our government is the one making the necessary changes in order to address them.

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