Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I refer to the previous government's decision to cut the fuel excise in half. It was a decision that saved motorists 22c per litre, at a cost to the budget of some $2.9 billion over a six-month period. I acknowledge that that was intended as a temporary and targeted measure in direct response to the war in Ukraine. It was a direct response to supply pressures and escalating prices for Australian motorists and small-business owners. There was an understanding by the previous government that those circumstances were putting real pressure on households and the small-business community.

Those external conditions still exist today, and the new government should extend the excise cut until after the summer school holidays, until at least February 2023. The reason I raise this today is that here on this side of the House, in the coalition, we tend to represent the communities with the lowest household incomes. Our communities, particularly in rural and regional areas, tend to have lower incomes than the electorates represented by those opposite in the metropolitan areas. They have low household incomes, but they also have a disproportionately high percentage of their family budgets taken up by transport costs—personal transport costs, in the case of using family cars—because the people who use their cars the most are the very same people that have the least access to public transport. There is no other choice in most of our regional and rural electorates than to use your own personal vehicle if you want to get around the community.

I look around the room here today and I see the member for Leichardt; the member for Dawson; yourself, Deputy Speaker Buchholz; the member for Wright; and the member for Moncrieff. Our communities are very dependent on personal transport but are also very dependent on a tourism recovery. Tourism is quite fragile at the moment. We have seen a reasonable tourism recovery—a reasonable tourism boom—brought about by the COVID pandemic where people couldn't travel overseas, but it is a fragile recovery and it relies very heavily on motoring holidays. The traditional, family motoring holiday, the one that most people can afford, is to put the kids in the car, drive to the Gold Coast, drive to Mackay, drive to Cairns, in my case drive to Gippsland or drive to your beautiful electorate, Deputy Speaker, and spend some time together. Against this background, where the international circumstances—the external circumstances—haven't changed, the pressure on household budgets is enormous and we're also seeing interest rate increases and other cost-of-living pressures, I urge the Treasurer to extend the fuel excise cut and give relief to Australian families.

I acknowledge that there are many calls on the budget and this is a difficult decision, but we need to keep families connected and we need to make sure this fragile recovery can continue. Anecdotally, I'm hearing reports of families opting to take their children out of sport because of the travel costs of going to training. The long-distance travel for attending matches in regional areas is getting too hard for those families to sustain. I'm also hearing reports that university students—we think of communities like ours, where kids are often living three and four hours away from home—who, instead of coming home and catching up with their mates and with their families every couple of weeks, are now making the choice to delay it to every four or six weeks. They're rationing their contact with their own families because of fuel costs. The new government has the power to act.