Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

This motion, I must say, is fairly typical of this government's approach over the last two years. There is a lot of talk and a lot of patting itself on the back. It's almost an orgy of self-congratulation, but there's very little delivery. It's a demonstration, once again, that this government is completely out of touch, particularly when it comes to policies impacting rural and regional Australians.

At the next election, Australians will be asking themselves some pretty simple questions. Australians will be asking themselves: Do I feel better or worse off? Is my family better or worse off? Do I feel safe in my family home? Do I feel safe in my community? Do I feel safe at my university campus? Is our country heading in the right direction? I must say that young Australians have never had it worse off than under the Albanese-Bandt government. Cost-of-living pressures are pushing many young people to breaking point. We've seen skyrocketing increases in housing, in power, in groceries and in fuel. We have a housing crisis that makes it almost impossible to find an affordable place to live, particularly in the large cities but also in our regional centres, and it's all been driven by Labor's high inflation and economic mismanagement. So this attempt today by the government—it is quite a premature attempt, I must say—to pat itself on the back for a job well done when Australians are suffering like never before shows just how out of touch this government is.

From a regional perspective, Deputy Speaker—I know you understand this well, coming from the Mornington Peninsula—students are experiencing massive cost increases in the housing affordability crisis and simply can't find properties when they're forced to move to Melbourne to continue their studies and when rental costs are out of control. The latest monthly Consumer Price Index data shows that Labor's cost-of-living crisis is hurting hardworking Australians. Core inflation, which is the Reserve Bank's preferred measure, rose to 4.1 per cent, well above the RBA's target. Australians continue to face one of the highest and most persistent rates of inflation of any advanced economy because this government—the Albanese-Bandt government!—has failed to tackle the source of the problem. With Labor's big-spending, big-government third budget, Australian households and businesses face higher prices, higher interest rates and higher taxes for longer. Labor has confused economic priorities, and they're hurting our households and small-business owners.

Under Labor's two years of homegrown inflation, the costs of everyday goods keep rising. We've seen food up by 11 per cent, housing up by 14 per cent, rents up by 13 per cent, electricity up by 20 per cent, gas up by 25 per cent, health up by 11 per cent and finance and insurance up by 15 per cent, and students are obviously not immune to this crisis. Students with low or fixed incomes are finding it very hard to excel at their studies and also undertake some part-time work to fund their own cost-of-living pressures.

So I do say to those opposite: Where is the legislation? Where is the legislation that the minister announced would be brought to this House? There are three million Australians with a student debt. HELP loans have escalated by almost 16 per cent since the Albanese government was elected. For someone with an average loan of $26,494, it will cost them an extra $4,000 under this term of government. Under the former coalition government, the average indexation rate was just 1.7 per cent. Labor said it would—and I quote—'cut the student debt of more than three million Australians in this month's budget', referring to May, obviously. However, why has the minister failed to bring forward the legislation in time to enact these changes to help indexation? When will we see the promised reductions in student debt, and when will they be delivered?

Labor's education budget also had some bad news for regional Australians more broadly, with the axing of the $224 million Destination Australia program, which was designed to support university students to study in our regional areas. We know that by just studying in a regional area younger people are more likely to pursue their careers in those regions and help alleviate some of the skilled workforce problems we face in our regional areas. Labor's budget cut $224 million from the Destination Australia program. The axing also of the coalition's Regional Research Collaboration program, which provided a range of supports for regional research was in the order of a $56 million loss to the regions. Again, Labor is big on talk but undermines the future of our regional communities.

This is in stark contrast to the way the coalition government backed students in rural and regional Australia. We increased the Tertiary Access Payment. We also provided regional university centres, and now Labor is placing those regional university centres in suburban areas.

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