Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

A cost-of-living crisis has real implications right across the board. It has real implications for the household budgets that people are facing at the moment. When you look at the facts, they are absolutely damning as to what this government, the Albanese Labor government, has delivered for the Australian people: the largest fall in real disposable income in the advanced world. Disposable incomes have collapsed by 8.7 per cent under this Labor government—the largest fall since records began. We have never had tougher times in this country than those that are being faced by the Australian people at the moment. That has real implications, and one of those implications is that we're seeing that, at a greater rate, people are putting off having children. Families and couples are taking the decision to put off having children, and now we've seen our fertility rate drop to 1.5.

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, say: 'There's nothing to see here. Everything is fine.' Well, by every measure, it's clear that everything isn't fine and they have to, before it is too late and they cause too much pain, focus on addressing the cost-of-living crisis in this nation. And, if they don't, then they should just say, 'This job of being in government is too hard for us, and we're going to let someone else have a try.' They could start by addressing the fact that we have seen personal income taxes increase by 25 per cent in the 2½ years they've been here. So you've seen real disposable incomes drop at a rate greater than nowhere else in the world, yet we've seen income taxes go up by 25 per cent. No wonder people are feeling pain in their household budgets.

Not only that but they are putting pressure on when it comes to housing, and we've seen how that pressure has been placed on the Australian people. They haven't been allowing houses to be built, and they've let in a million people in just over two years. So there are no houses being built, and a million people have come into this country, and they wonder why we've got a rental crisis and a housing crisis. Why then are young Australians especially going, 'I don't know whether this is the right economic climate to have children in and I don't know whether I can afford to have children, because, first of all, I want to be able to put a roof over my head.'

That's why this motion is so important: it calls out the government to finally act. Get your heads out of the sand, Prime Minister and Treasurer, and understand the pain that you're causing people and understand that you need to act. You've got one last opportunity before the election, because we're all assuming the election is going to be in March, and that's the MYEFO. So when you deliver the MYEFO, Treasurer, in the lead-up to Christmas, let's see you address some of these cost-of-living issues. If you do that, you might start to instil some confidence—into young people, in particular—that now is the time to start a family.

But, if you continue down your policy approach—with a 25 per cent increase in income tax and through making sure that disposable incomes reduce at a rate that we've never seen before, making sure that you're not building houses and making sure that you're continuing to deliver your 'big Australia' policy, which has seen one million people come to this country in the last couple of years—then I can tell you that what we're going to see, sadly, is that fertility rate get even worse. We have to ensure that young Australians can have the dream of owning their own home and having their own family.

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