Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We'll be supporting this bill. Sadly, two years into this government, Australians are paying the price for a succession of bad decisions and the wrong priorities from this government. We'll be supporting these measures because Australians are poorer after two years of a Labor government. Australians have rarely in our history looked back from one election to the next and—without overstating it, without overblowing it, without trying to throw all the political rhetoric out there—been able to say, 'We are actually poorer than we were at the last election.' That is sadly what is going to happen at the time of the next election.

We'll support these very minor proposals from the government, increasing Commonwealth rental assistance in schedule 1 of this bill, and in schedules 2 and 3 making some very minor amendments including some flexibility amendments to JobSeeker arrangements, and for those on carer payments and their ability to work hours and providing greater flexibility. Pretty uncontroversial stuff, but a bandaid on a bullet wound here of what is being felt by Australians throughout this country.

If you've got a mortgage in Australia today, you are $35,000 a year worse off. After three budgets we've seen terrible stewardship of this economy. We now have core inflation which is, I think, even troubling the hardheads in the government that we now have homegrown inflation. In the immediate aftermath of COVID, clearly the Australian economy was hit by inflation that had flowed through the supply chain and material shortages that were a global phenomenon. We wore that pain, as did every other trading nation in the world.

But what's occurring now is that we have homegrown inflation. Whilst inflation is going backwards in most competitor economies, or in most economies that we would compare ourselves to, we now have inflation remaining stubbornly where it is. That means interest rates will have to be higher for longer. That's an immutable fact, and it doesn't matter how much the Treasurer tries to spin this. The reason why this is relevant to this bill is that, ultimately, the Social Services portfolio is trying to paper over the cracks that are emerging because of the terrible mismanagement of this economy. The truth is that no social services budget or portfolio measure can ultimately paper over the gaping cracks occurring in this economy now, which are hitting families extraordinarily hard.

The truth is that food is up by more than 10 per cent and housing is up by 14 per cent. This year—from April to April—for housing alone, we saw rents up by nearly eight per cent. Since this government has been in power, we've seen rents increase by more than 20 per cent on average. If the average is 20 per cent, I can say right now that there are many parts of this country where rents are up by 25, 30, 35 or 40 per cent. There's nothing that the social services minister can do, even with a modest increase in Commonwealth rental assistance, which can address those issues. There's nothing the social services minister can do to assist a family which has an average mortgage and is paying $35,000 a year more in this country. That doesn't even account for those families—particularly those in metropolitan Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane—in most of our metro areas who have mortgages well above the average. These are people who will, literally, be spending tens of thousands of dollars more just to service their mortgages to put roofs over the heads of their families.

We're supporting this bill, but what Australians don't want to see is the self-congratulatory patting on the back here, which we see every single day, by the government about how wonderfully they're doing things for the Australian people. People are struggling out there. People are struggling in a way that I've not seen in my lifetime. Sadly, this is something that we often see with federal Labor governments. Labor always says, 'We just have very bad timing.' The poor old Labor governments just have bad timing! They think that they just inherit these difficult circumstances. No, they create the difficult circumstances. The lack of a budget strategy here and the lack of a strategy to put downward pressure on inflation and to reduce interest rates means that there's nothing this social services minister can do to address and alleviate the issues being faced.

We were promised by her Prime Minister before the election, on 97 occasions, no less—97 times!—that he would reduce power prices by $275 each and every year. That was to below the level it was in 2022. We now have power prices up by nearly a couple of thousand dollars since that time. We all thought it was pretty heroic for the now Prime Minister to make those promises before the election. Some of us wondered if there was something he knew that we didn't, or if he had something up his sleeve that we didn't. Well, no, the truth is that the now Prime Minister clearly made a decision to say whatever he needed to say to deceive Australians into voting for him, with him knowing that he would not be able to deliver it afterwards. What do we see now? We see electricity up by 20 per cent and we see gas up by 25 per cent. Again, there's nothing that the social services minister can do, on her own, to address the pain that is being felt by Australians.

I, like many people in this chamber, meet people now; I meet constituents who choose not to put the heating on because they can't afford to. I meet constituents who, in summer, will not run an air conditioner because they just cannot afford to do so. Is this seriously Labor's vision for this country?

We see through other budget measures from this government a complete lack of understanding as to the impact they're having because they seem so self-satisfied. They have this air of 'Australians have never had it better' and that, somehow, Australians should be grateful for what they're doing. This social services minister thinks she deserves a pat on the back because of the increase in Commonwealth rental assistance that's contained in this bill. Every single one of those recipients of Commonwealth rental assistance is worse off because their rents have gone up by more than the assistance has gone up. They take with one hand and give a little bit back with the other, and say, 'We want a pat on the back for that transaction.' That's not how it works. People are worse off because of the decisions of this government. The social services minister sits around that cabinet table and signs up to all the policies that have delivered the wreckage we're seeing.

We see the government, in the wake of our budget reply, criticising our calls to reduce migration to free up 100,000 homes for Australians. We think that, first and foremost, homes are there for Australians; that's what homes should be there for. We support a decent migration program, but it's got to be a migration program in our interests. It's got to be a migration program that works for Australians. We've had world-record levels of migration from this government—nearly a million migrants at a time when only 265,000 homes were built. You don't need to be a Rhodes scholar or a housing expert or an economist to realise you can't bring in, in the middle of a housing crisis, a million new people in two years when you're building fewer homes than were built by the former coalition government. House builds are going down and migration has been ramped up to 10 out of 10—a million migrants when only 265,000 homes have been built.

Hidden in that statistic of 265,000, by the way, is that a significant portion of those homes are just replacements of old homes. If you have a knockdown rebuild, that's considered a new home—but you haven't increased housing stock at all; you've just knocked one down and replaced it with a new one. The numbers hide the story that things are much worse than that—and what do we see? We see a terrible housing crisis. We see rents going up at unmitigated levels. And the government say, 'Give us a pat on the back, because we're going to give a little bit more in Commonwealth rental assistance to a very small proportion of the population.' The vast majority, more than 90 per cent of renters, don't receive Commonwealth rental assistance. What on earth is there in the budget for them? What on earth is going to alleviate their housing costs? Clearly, nothing in this bill.

Whilst supporting the bill, we're not going to be throwing confetti at this government on any of these changes. We are disappointed to see this budget failed on virtually every single metric. The social services component was not able to rescue a terrible budget—a budget that sunk like a stone. As a former Assistant Treasurer, I can tell you that you would spend day in, day out selling your budget for weeks and, in some cases, months. You barely hear a peep out of this government on their budget, understandably. I suspect members opposite went back to their electorates and probably did what they do here; their first instinct was to go back to their electorates and try and get a pat on the back from their constituents, and their constituents probably looked at them with a quizzical look on their faces as if to suggest: 'You seriously think we're going to give you a pat on the back for that—for that budget you stumped up and for this economy you've delivered for us? Absolutely no way.' Since getting that reaction, I think it's understandable it's not something this government will talk about it. The truth is they failed Australians. Your first priority from an economic perspective in this country is to improve the lot for households. Your first job—in fact, it's the reason why every single one of us is here—is ultimately to provide opportunities for prosperity to the next generation of Australians that are just a little bit better than what we had handed to us. That's the golden rule of politics. It's the golden rule of what you need to do.

I will finish where I started. After two years of an Albanese government, Australians are poorer than at the beginning. That's not open for interpretation. It's not an area that you would be able to credibly politically debate. Australians are poorer than they were two years ago. The dollar doesn't go as far as it did two years ago. Their housing costs are demonstrably higher than they were two years ago. Their real wages have gone backwards under this government. On every single metric, Australians are doing it tougher. So the social services minister and this government are not going to get a pat on the back from us for giving a tiny bit back with one hand of what they have taken with the other over the past two years from those households and those Australians who are really struggling.

Debate adjourned.