Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask a question that I ask Australians and other members of my community right now: are you better off or worse off after two years of this Labor government? The answer is universally, 'I am worse off.' The figures that I'm going to read out now are the figures that explain why families and businesses are feeling worse off now than they were two years ago. We saw this week the quarterly GDP number come out at 0.1 per cent. Except for the two quarters we had during the pandemic, which were obviously very unusual, that was the weakest quarterly growth that we've seen since 1991. When you take GDP per capita—that means GDP per person; we were growing by taking more people into the country at the time—it was actually a fall of 0.4 per cent for the quarter, and we've now had five quarters of negative GDP when you look at the growth in the population.

Productivity—this is a really scary one—has fallen 5.2 per cent under this government from March 2022 to March 2024. That's saying we're becoming less productive, less efficient, in what we do and how we do things. It is more expensive. That's a very scary figure for the future of our country right now.

From March 2022 to March 2024, Australian households have been paying 20 per cent more income tax. Interest payments—this is huge, as I know you know, Speaker—paid on mortgages rose 3.9 per cent for the quarter and have increased 30 per cent since the election. Most people's mortgages have almost tripled. Prices have increased 9.8 per cent from May 2022 to April 2024.

This is another figure that explains why families and businesses are feeling poorer. Real household disposable income has fallen nearly two per cent over the year on a per capita basis, and since the election real disposable income has fallen nearly eight per cent on a per capita basis. The household savings ratio, at 0.9 per cent, is down 9.9 percentage points since the election. As we know, we've had big population growth through that, which has affected some of those figures.

All of us, as MPs and parliamentarians, go around our communities all the time, and the biggest issue of the day for the whole of the two years has been cost of living. When you look at a typical family—we've used this on a number of occasions on this side of the House. We talk about where a family is today relative to two years ago. The figures say that a typical family is $35,000 a year worse off. You could as, 'Where do you get that figure from?' This is a typical house with a mortgage, and a big part of that—over 20 per cent—is their increased mortgage cost. An average mortgage is around $700,000 to $800,000. When you look at the increase in mortgage cost over that period, that's over $20,000 extra taken out of an average family's income. We also have food up 11 per cent, housing up 14 per cent, rents up 13 per cent, electricity up 20 per cent, gas up 25 per cent, health up 11 per cent, education up 11 per cent and financial insurance up 11 per cent.

On this side we all acknowledge that, especially at the initial stage of this inflationary upswing, some of this was global. We did have Ukraine. We had some supply chain issues as well. There were some inflationary pressures around the world. But the Reserve Bank and our leading economists are now saying our inflation is homegrown, not necessarily like it was two years ago. It's homegrown now after two years of this Labor government. Core inflation is higher than the US, the UK, Japan, Canada and the euro area.

What is this government doing that has caused our inflation rate to be higher than others? One thing is government spending. They're now spending $315 billion more than we were two years ago. That's a lot of increase in spending, which is inflationary of itself. We had a bill today, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Market Infrastructure and Other Measures) Bill 2024, which was in part about scope 3 emissions. Accounting for scope 3 emissions has added to the inflationary pressures. We had the truckie tax that they introduced, which was basically a tax on getting anything to a supermarket and which was inflationary as well. Something that is yet to come through but is not going to help either is the ute tax. So Australians are feeling worse off than they were two years ago because of this Labor government.