Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Whitlam visited my electorate last week. He came to Wagga Wagga upon my invitation and conducted an antiscams forum with me. I want to publicly acknowledge and thank him for the work that he is doing in this important public policy area, which is building on what we did as a coalition government. I now want to take him up on the fact that he said Labor inherited 'a diabolical mess'. What they inherited was a nation which was rated, judged, by the John Hopkins institute, no less, as being the second-best nation in the world for its COVID-19 response. By spending money—yes, a lot of it—we kept tens of thousands of Australians alive. We kept tens of thousands of Australians in jobs and kept the doors open for tens of thousands of businesses. We did that despite the backdrop of those opposite being very negative about lots of the policies that we put forward and the state Labor premiers also often being obstinate when we were trying to bring forward good policies in what was a terrible time of a global pandemic.

On budget night this year, the respected economist Chris Richardson had this to say:

My big ask of the Budget was that it didn't poke the inflationary bear.

I don't think it passed that test.

The government said it would be careful not to frontload its new costs. But that's exactly what it did—its new dollars are both big AND fast.

In the coming year they're eight times the size of what they are by 2027-28.

So this budget narrows the Reserve Bank's already narrow path.

Inflation is high. It is too high, and it's going up and up under Labor. Today in the Australian, Mr Richardson is critical of the decisions by federal and state governments, and every mainland state in Australia is under the steed of a Labor government. He talks about decisions in recent budgets to pour billions of additional dollars into the economy under the guise of cost-of-living relief that could ultimately make life harder for struggling households by keeping inflation higher for longer. This is what he said:

Governments are throwing a lot of money at the symptoms of the cost-of-living crisis, but that worsens the cause of it. And the cause is too many dollars chasing two little stuff … Governments have abandoned the field in the inflation fight. We are fighting the inflation fight one-handed.

When we talk about being one-handed, we've got a lot of families and small business owners with their hand very much behind their backs, because they are struggling, and it is tough out there. I know the member for Whitlam acknowledged that and so did the Shadow Treasurer in their contributions to this matter of public importance discussion. It is so tough for people out there. I ask this question of people who might be listening to this broadcast: are you better off now, or were you better off prior to May 2022? People are much the poorer now. In fact, most households are paying a thousand dollars more on their power bills than they were when the coalition was in government.

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