David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government is making life harder for Australians. Everywhere you look, mums and dads are facing higher bills. Since this government came to power, the average mortgage in Australia has gone up thousands and thousands of after-tax dollars in every family budget. If you haven't got a mortgage, you're worse off, too: rents are up 14.2 per cent. There's a housing shortage, yet this government is overseeing the biggest immigration program, in the middle of a housing availability crisis. It's not just housing affordability; we're running out of houses and apartments, and we have record numbers of temporary migrants coming in.

People don't realise that a lot of these temporary migrants aren't just on tourist visas; they are also here on student visas. They might end up studying here for four to five years. Some are in real causes, but many of them sign up for mickey mouse courses, get their student visa and go into the job market. They're not the high-skilled migrants we want. They stay here so long as temporary migrants that they qualify and are able to apply for the permanent migration system. Really, the permanent migration system, which is based on skills, is being filled in large part by those who have hung around long enough to apply for it. It is counterproductive when you're in the middle of a housing shortage.

Education costs are up. Everywhere that mums and dads in my electorate turn, prices are up. Education costs are up 11 per cent. Health costs are up 11.9 per cent. We've had some unsustainable wage rises. I know everyone wants a wage rise, but it has to be done gradually, without making inflation worse. Across-the-board wage rises of 25 per cent are not sustainable, but there are some professions in the health industry that have managed to wrangle that.

We have an inflationary budget, with $315 billion in extra spending in the last budget. That is a mind-boggling amount of money when you don't have a national emergency like the COVID crisis or World War II. That increase is unbelievable when we're trying to get inflation down. Inflation eats away at the value of people's savings. The value of everything is reduced when inflation increases, and it's now up to 4.4 per cent. Our economic growth per head of population is not growing. Our gross GDP is growing but that is only because we have record rates of inflation. We need genuine economic growth.

At the core of every industrial economy is the electricity system and the cost of liquid energy. Those two things drive everything in the post-industrial economies. What have we got? We've got a shortage of our own liquid fuel. We are having an absolute shortage of electricity. Many days there are warnings from AEMO that we don't have enough energy and we're going to be short on gas, yet this government is tying the gas industry up by not approving gas development and gas is important for everything, not just energy—heating, industrial processes.

Everywhere you go, things aren't working because of core problems. We are destroying our competitiveness and our economy by making our power generation expensive. Little do people realise that every year approximately $3.7 billion in green electricity subsidies get into their electricity bill. That is for the large generation certificates and for the small-scale technology certificates and some other state subsidies. When you add all those up every year, that is almost getting to $4 billion a year. They are subsidies, and these renewable projects are going off the Richter scale. They are being waved through without any environmental checking and that means there will be more large generating subsidies. A lot of these green energy projects are subsidy generating projects that are only viable because of subsidies and that is one of the root causes of inflation. (Time expired)

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