Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the additional appropriation bills for 2024-2025: Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-2025, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-25 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025. These bills provide the necessary appropriations to ensure the continued delivery of essential government services and to fund decisions made since the 2024-25 budget was announced in May last year. In total, these bills appropriate approximately $12 billion for the remainder of the financial year, the majority of which, some $7 billion, is directed towards the ordinary annual services of government.

The opposition supports this legislation to ensure the smooth operation of government and the uninterrupted provision of services that the Australian people rely on. However, while we support these bills as a matter of necessity, we must also use this opportunity to highlight the grave economic mismanagement that has led us to this point and put Australians under so much cost-of-living pressure. These bills, like the budget bills before them, were introduced in the context of a budget and MYEFO update that yet again expose the Albanese Labor government's utter failure to tackle its cost-of-living crisis. The Albanese government cannot manage the economy. That is why we have seen inflation far too high for far too long. They cannot manage the budget. That is why we have seen $347 billion in additional spending that has fuelled inflation and kept rents, mortgages and the cost-of-living high for the people who we represent.

The evidence of the Albanese Labor government's failures has been mounting since they were elected back in May 2022. What do they have to show for their additional $347 billion in expenditure? What do they really have to show apart from higher prices, higher interest rates, higher rents, more small businesses collapsing—some 27,000—and lower living standards. In fact, they are saying that living standards have dropped so far under this government that it wouldn't be until the year 2030 that living standards would recover to where they were under the former coalition government.

Under the Albanese government's economic mismanagement, we are witnessing the longest sustained period of inflation since the 1980s. Interest rates have been hiked 12 times under this government alone compared to once in nine years under the former coalition government. Energy bills have risen by an average of $1,000 per household, in stark contrast to what was promised by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer prior to the last election when they said energy bills would fall by $275. They've actually risen by $1,000 per household. For businesses, the story is worse. Often, there have been 100 per cent increases. Living standards have collapsed. As I said before, businesses have gone insolvent. We are in a sustained household recession with negligible productive growth. Productivity has fallen through the floor. So for all the people that I represent, the people in Petrie, when they buy a product or get something done, what they're buying is a lot less than what it was just three years ago. That is because productivity has also collapsed.

What is the government's response to all of this? When we come into question time each day and when we hear the ministers in the media, what is their response? It's denial and indifference. The Prime Minister says to Australians, like he did in 2022: 'Trust me. You'll be better off under Labor.' Their coalition partners in the Senate, the Greens party, are also responsible for this. After 2½ years, or almost three years, now, Australians know better. Let's look at the real impact of Labor's failures on everyday Australians. The employee living cost index, an index measuring the true cost of living for hardworking Australian families, has surged by 19.4 per cent since the government took office. That is a huge jump, far outstripping any sort of wage growth or anything the government has done to try and help this situation. It's surged almost 20 per cent. That's almost 50 per cent higher than the consumer price index over the same period.

We have seen a 66 per cent increase in the number of people seeking assistance with their energy bills—just to keep the lights on at home, just to keep the wi-fi going at home. You want to relax after a big day's work and watch a bit of Netflix. We have seen people seeking assistance with energy bills, and that's not what was promised prior to the last election, when they said: 'Renewables are cheap. We're going to be a renewable energy superpower.' Have you heard that expression before from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, that we're going to be a renewable energy superpower? What's it done? It's made household bills go up by $1,000 by ensuring that all new energy is just coming from Chinese-made solar farms and wind farms. That is not working; it's not the solution. And they won't even put a cost on the additional transmission lines, the some 27,000 new lines that have been dug up through national parks and over sand dunes without, really, I think, much of an environmental impact study, because: 'It's renewables. We've just got to do it.' Bang—pop it in. The coalition has other solutions, which the Leader of the Opposition and our shadow minister for climate change and energy, Ted O'Brien, have spelt out in relation to gas, renewables and emissions-free, modern nuclear power that can be dropped in at seven locations where we currently have those transmission lines. So we can go emissions free under our policy without destroying sand dunes and national parks and running 27,000 kilometres of new poles and wires through rural and agricultural land.

At the end of the day, when you focus on Australians and what's best for them, not what's ideological about the policy, Australians are better off. When you govern just for union donors or when you govern for a small amount of people, then what happens is the policies go wrong and most Australians cop it through higher cost of living.

It's the same with the Greens; they're no different. When they say, 'Let's tax billionaires,' it all sounds good—tax millionaires, tax billionaires and everything else. But what Australians don't understand is that the students that are at university and the people that are perhaps on some sort of welfare assistance—when you tax those businesses, which are often the vehicle through which people have made their wealth through entrepreneurial activities, all of those costs of higher taxes. You see the Greens running around with 'Tax billionaires' shirts. Those higher taxes are passed on to the consumers that we represent in Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. That is the absolute reality. So it's easy for a protest party of government, like the Greens, which is not a government party, to come in and say, 'Free this, free that, free dental, free HECS, free TAFE'—whatever it might be, someone is paying for it all, and they're paying for it through higher taxes, which is how the Australian government gets its money. They don't have a money tree out the back; the Treasurer doesn't have a money tree out the back of his parliamentary office that he just plucks the billions of dollars from to bring down the budget every May, right? It comes from taxes levied on the Australian people, and what we see, every day in this place, are more and more bills coming through to find new ways to tax people.

Yesterday, we had the member for Kooyong—and don't believe me, go to the Hansard and look at what she said. She wants to tax every person in Australia that currently claims a tax deduction on a ute. She wants to tax them. That's what she said. She basically said: 'There are three million utes in Australia and only two million businesses, to round it up. Therefore, one million people must be rorting the system because they're not apprentices.' I said to the member for Kooyong, who's a teal—she says she's Independent but votes with the Greens 80 per cent of the time—that there are more people than just qualified tradespeople that use utes. What she, and others in this place, fail to understand is that farmers, for example, are not tradespeople. But guess what? They deliver food to Bendigo, to Kooyong and to Petrie, and right around the country. They use utes, and they can claim a legitimate tax deduction, as to fringe benefits tax, or on some sort of LandCruiser ute that's probably over the luxury car tax threshold—and rightly so; so they should.

This is what happens when you get elites that earn a lot of money coming in here and saying, 'Oh, we just need to tax people more.' But who cops it? The farmers cop it.

Let's say you were to take the advice of the member for Kooyong, who has written to the Treasurer saying that that tax exemption for utes should be removed. Let's say he takes that advice and the cost of utes goes up. What does that do to the price of apples, lamb or tomatoes, or pest control, or any other service where small-business people use a ute but they're not actually tradespeople? Take concreters, for example. People might want to put a driveway in for their house or a path from their back door to the clothesline. Concreters are not tradies; they haven't done a four-year apprenticeship. But they use utes as legitimate tools for their business. We need people to wake up a bit and explain how higher taxes are passed on to the people that we actually represent.

Families are struggling to keep the lights on; there's no doubt about it. Mortgage holders are facing an additional $50,000 in repayments just to keep a roof over their heads. Small businesses are closing their doors at an alarming rate. This is the reality of Labor's cost-of-living crisis, and yet, despite all of the pain and suffering, the Prime Minister hasn't offered any comfort or solutions and has no plan to ease the burden on Australians. The cost-of-living crisis we face today is not a coincidence; it is a direct result of the government's economic incompetence. Australians are crying out for relief and are saying Labor has failed them. Instead of addressing these real and pressing issues, this government continues to ignore the struggles of hardworking families and small businesses.

While we support these additional appropriation bills to ensure the continued functioning of government, we will not stand idly by while Labor's economic failures wreak havoc on Australian households. If you think it's bad now, just three months before the federal election is due, imagine what it would be like with a Labor-Greens-teal government in the next parliament, where you'd have members like the member for Kooyong and the member for Melbourne putting bills into this place with the Prime Minister. I can tell you now, it would be bad for Australia.

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