Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

Hooley dooley, there's been quite a strange question time and a strange start to the MPI from the member just opposite who spoke. They put out their budget this week, and you'd think they would take every opportunity to talk about their budget, talk about why they are proud of their budget, talk about how they think their budget's going to be good for Australian families, especially in relation to cost of living, but in question time all we saw from the Prime Minister to the Treasurer to a whole conga line of others was just wanting to talk about us. And it wasn't just talking about us; they wanted to go back 10 years. They wanted to talk about a whole long line of history.

I thought: 'Okay, so the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury just came in. He's supposedly one of their brains. He's not a union hack. He actually went to Harvard. He's got a PhD.' I went: 'Great. He'll want to talk about the budget. He'll want to talk about economics. He'll want to talk about cost of living—it's important—and why he thinks the government's policies are good for cost of living.' I thought: 'He's going to sound really academic. They always try to sound intelligent.' I was like: 'Okay, it's going to be great. I'm going to listen to an economic expose about why that budget they brought down was a good budget.' I was probably going to find it hard to believe, but I was at least looking forward to him having a go. It was worse than question time! He brought in a book. He was quoting Dutton from 10 years ago, who did this five years ago, who did—you know what that says to me about today's question time and about our supposedly learned assistant minister who just spoke? They've got nothing to talk about in the budget.

When they've talked about cost of living and the budget this week, their first thought wasn't, 'I'm going to go in and start to talk about this policy or what we've just done, about why that's good for cost of living.' They didn't think of that first; they thought they'd have a go at us—because they've got nothing to talk about in the fact of what this budget did to improve cost of living. And that is a real shame, because the average Australian family is $35,000 a year worse off than they were two years ago. That's not my figure; that's an independently calculated figure.

You might say, how can you say that? Let's break it up. What is the major component of that? Over $20,000 of it is the increased mortgage cost of an average family. That is the main thing. The main thing that has made the cost of living higher for an Australian family is interest rates. Have any of them mentioned interest rates as a topic today? No. Did the member who just got up mention interest rates? No. But we know why they haven't. It is because every economist who's been commenting on the budget this week has said, 'Uh-oh: danger,' because of the government's prolific spending.

It's a well-known economic correlation that when you increase spending you put inflationary pressures on. So a lot of the economists are saying there's a lot of danger in the budget, because the increased spending—they're spending $300 billion a year more than we were when we were in government—is potentially going to put inflationary pressure on. That means interest rates aren't going to come down. That's why some economists, such as Warren Hogan from Judo Bank, even talked about rates potentially going up. Why are they saying that? They're saying that because of what this government is doing.

That's why they didn't talk about. It's been quite amazing. I literally thought—wrongly; I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose—that they would come in today and talk about their budget and why they're proud of it, and I certainly thought that in the MPI today they would come in and talk about what they're proud of in their budget. Again, I think it highlights that they've got nothing to be proud of about it in terms of dealing with cost-of-living issues.

I did have quite a number of other things I wanted to talk about, but I've been distracted by the first speaker from the other side. I was going to go into energy costs and why they have gone up. We know they promised lower power bills, and I wanted to go through the reckless renewable targets they have. Forty per cent of your energy bill is from transmission lines. They want to build 28,000 kilometres of them, so we'll see how the power bills go with that. I wanted to talk about food inflation as well. We know Labor don't like farmers; we know that with live export and we know that with the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the trucking tax and everything else.

Cost of living is a real issue. The government doesn't get it, and it's reflected in what they've been saying today.

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