Mr Robert:

The cost of living is through the roof, and families right across the Gold Coast are suffering. We often come into this place and make this point, and those opposite—particularly the Treasurer—swear black and blue that they have everything under control, that they are taming inflation, blah, blah, blah. Yesterday morning I was reading the Gold Coast Bulletin, as I always do, and I find an article the heading, 'Struggling to survive'. I will read a quote from that article:

A staggering two-thirds of Queenslanders are still struggling to pay their bills, put food on the table or send their children to school due to relentless cost-of-living pressures, with poverty rates expected to skyrocket across the state once government rebates run dry.

A new survey by the Queensland Council of Social Service has found 94 per cent of the state is worried about cost of living, with weekly budgets blowing out for nearly all types of households due to unaffordable housing, grocery, energy and petrol costs.

What is causing this pain? An indicator is that our inflation is higher than all comparable economies. It's higher than the US, the UK, Canada, Japan and New Zealand. The economy is in the worst shape it has been in since the 1990s, excluding the pandemic years. This is a consequence of a Labor government that has spent its entire term in office fighting everything but inflation. They fought everyone on the Voice, they fight our farmers, who are just trying to give us food, and they fight the Reserve Bank, who have a job to do. They are not fighting for you.

Just today in question time we got the passive-aggressive Treasurer leaning casually over the despatch box, reading the talking points on what they've done to make everyone's lives better, like the stage 3 tax cuts—although, they don't want to call them the stage 3 tax cuts anymore because that would acknowledge that there was a stage 1 and 2 that were delivered by the coalition government. The stage 3 tax cuts—at most, $15.46 per week more in your pay packet. This is the kicker, though: the average household with a mortgage of $750,000 is now $35,000 worse off than when Labor first took office—that's $673 per week. The Treasurer needs to get real, get his calculator out and do the maths. People are worse off under this Labor government. They have suffered through 12 interest rate rises and they know that there's no relief in sight because the arrogant and out-of-touch Treasurer wants to play chicken with the Reserve Bank. The government have many levers it can use to bring down inflation, and the interest rates would then follow, but they've failed on that front. They continue to fail.

Local families that I talk to know that inflation is staying too high for too long because of this government, and the thing with inflation is it goes up and it stays up. They can see their grocery bills and power bills going up, despite the Prime Minister promising before the election that they would be going down. The middle-class families in suburbs across my electorate—like Helensvale, Coomera or Pacific Pines—are running a distant last as the priority of this government to bureaucrats in Canberra and Labor's union mates.

What else is an indicator of this is the government's antibusiness approach, which is hurting the economy rather than supporting ambition. I take pride in the fact that the Gold Coast is the small-business capital of Australia, but we know business insolvencies are at an all-time high. We've been breaking records that, quite frankly, should not be broken. Last year 2,036 businesses went insolvent in Queensland. The evidence is there. The government is ruining livelihoods, and it's ruining lives. We know that there are small businesses that are out there suffering at the hands of terrible policy, increases in inflation, increases in interest rates that are making it more expensive to do business. So, at the next federal election, Australians will have a clear choice. If you're worse off now than you were two years ago, show Labor the door. (Time expired)