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

Deputy Speaker Wilkie, you've been around this place for a while. I know you're a member of parliament that would be in tune with your community. We have the pleasure of having the member for Hinkler in the chamber as well, and I know he's very much in tune with the people in his community. I know that you're hearing, the member for Hinkler's hearing and I'm hearing that issue No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10— I could keep going, but you get the idea—issue 1 to 10 and on, is cost of living. We have families who are really, really doing it tough. They're really worried every day about their family budget, worried every day about how much money they've got to spend on food for their family, for their children, worried if they can afford to send their children on an excursion, worried if they've got enough money to put petrol in the car for where they need to go this week and the list goes on and on.

The disappointing thing about this is that this government is a bit late to the party in seeing that this is an issue. I say this to people in the community, and the people under pressure believe me, but sometimes I'll talk to members of the press and say, 'The average family is about $35,000 a year worse off.' They go: 'How do you come up with that? That's obviously the typical thing that an opposition would say.' I then refer them to the people who do this analysis. They then work it out and go, 'Oh, yes.' Over $20,000 of that figure is in mortgage repayments. The average mortgage in Australia is around $700,000 to $800,000. Some people have more. I probably shouldn't name him, but my son has a bigger mortgage than that. He's a 27-year-old. He's just bought a place in Sydney for a lot of money. There are a lot of people with more than a $700,000 or $800,000 mortgage.

Under this government, we've had interest rates go up 11 times. They'll make up a whole lot of reasons, blame other people or not accept responsibility—'Don't look here. It's got nothing to do with us'—but mortgage rates have gone up 11 times under them. You can say, 'They can't help that,' but the thing is that before the election in 2022, Deputy Speaker—I'm sure you remember this—they said that mortgages would be cheaper under them. Work that out. The other things that have made the other $10,000 are that health costs are up, education's up, food's up, housing's up, rents are up, finance and insurance are up and energy costs are up. Gas alone is up 33 per cent, but energy costs are up an enormous amount of money too.

You might say, 'Why is that the government's fault?' It's the government's fault because the government misled the Australian public before the election. You might say, 'Everyone gets it wrong,' but before the election, on 90-odd occasions, the Prime Minister said that your electricity bill was going to go down by $275. Not only did he say that, but he actually said that that was the most modelled government policy in the history of the country from opposition. Not only was he saying it was going to go down, but he was saying, 'We're going to stand by this because the modelling we have on this is the most sophisticated by an opposition in Australian political history. Even after the election he was saying this for a little while, but then about two months after the election, suddenly he was like, 'Uh-oh, maybe this isn't going to happen,' and they won't mention the figure again. Then they have the hide—because they don't accept responsibility and they don't say, 'We got it wrong'—to blame other things or other people. In this case, for a while, they were blaming the Ukraine war, but the timing was unfortunate for them. The Ukraine war had started well before the election. Yet, pre the election and post the election, they were still saying that they were going to bring down energy prices.

The other thing that we don't hear from the government is—the Reserve Bank is under a lot of pressure. 'Bully' is a bit strong, I suppose, but the Treasurer and others in the government are really pressuring the Reserve Bank to bring down interest rates. As the Reserve Bank has said, a lot of this is homegrown inflation. This isn't inflation necessarily because of external issues. The Australian government has increased spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. That's inflationary. Some of the results of the industrial relations legislation—you can say, 'People need higher wages to keep up with inflation,' but it can be a revolving circle of one trying to catch the other. A lot of the decisions by the government are going to mean that inflation in this country is going to stay higher for longer. That's not me saying that. That's professional financial analysts and economists saying that. Here we are in Australia with a government that was misleading about when before the election they said that mortgages were going to be cheaper and energy was going to be cheaper, and then suddenly all bets are off once they win, and none of that happens.

I was being misleading too. I said at the start that they're a bit late coming to the party on this. Interest rates were going up from almost the first month they were in—they were going up and up. For the first year, the government wasn't talking about cost-of-living increases. We were. Very early on, we were saying to the government: 'Cost of living is going up. You need to get on this. You need to get on it early. You need to make decisions that are going to make life easier for families in Australia.' But for 18 months they were distracted by a whole lot of other things. They weren't talking about the cost of living at this time last year, and the cost of living was raw this time last year. This time last year, they'd just spent $450 million and were dividing the country on a race referendum, the Voice referendum. There was no talk about the cost of living then. They were distracted by a whole lot of other issues.

As to energy, I'm here with the member for Hinkler, and I almost feel humbled speaking about energy in front of him. He's forgotten more about energy, how it works and what drives its prices and production than most people in this chamber know about energy. The government's energy policies, with their reckless renewables-only policy, mean that energy prices have gone up. The countries who have the most reliance on renewables have the highest prices. This reckless policy the government have means that our energy prices have gone up in the last two years, and some of this is on the back of the government's policies.

One thing they never want to talk about is some of the costs associated with this, but let's talk about one of them. Intuitively, you think: 'Okay, the sun shines and the wind blows, and that's free, right? You don't have to generate it.' The member for Hinkler just shook his head, because it's a fallacy. And why is it a fallacy? It's because the wind doesn't blow all the time. Member for Hinkler, please interject if I'm wrong, but I think the wind blows 30 to 40 per cent of the time.

Keith Pitt (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's correct.

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

There you go. I knew that it's lower for solar. How much is solar? You can bet on how much?

Keith Pitt (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Twenty-two per cent.

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

Twenty-two per cent. I was going to say that it was higher than that. It's lower than I thought. So when the sun's shining you can rely on the sun for—let's round it to 25 per cent of the time. The wind's blowing for just over 30 per cent of the time. The issue that makes renewables expensive is that you need a backup, whether that's battery technology that doesn't even exist yet; gas, which we will obviously need to look at; or a baseload that needs to be ready to go when they're not working. All that adds to the cost of your energy.

The other thing they don't like talking about or never mention is, of course, the 28,000 kilometres of new transmission systems, poles and wires that you're going to have to build. Of course, when we were in government, we had a solar program for solar panels for people's roofs. It's pretty simple. Those are connected to the poles-and-wires system right now. But where you need to build these wind turbines and solar panels on mass scale is where there are no poles, wires and transmission systems. That's, we think, $100 billion, and probably more, to build that. That seems to be an off-balance-sheet consideration. We're not really taking that into account when we're looking at people's prices. Again, there's a whole lot of fallacies around that, so don't expect your energy bills to be coming down under this lot. In fact, unfortunately, not only should you not expect your energy bills to be coming down; you should expect the lights to be potentially going out soon as well.

Again, there have been lots of bad decisions by this government. Deputy Speaker Wilkie, I know you agree with me on issues 1 to 10. You might not agree with everything else I said today, but I know you agree with me on that. Unfortunately there are many, many decisions and many, many policies that this government is making that are accentuating the cost-of-living crisis in this country. I didn't even get onto the housing issue. I didn't even mention the 1.2 million people who have come into the country over the last few years, without enough houses to house them, which gives us our rent and housing crisis as well.

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Page. I would agree it would be within 1 to 10, but maybe not 1 to 10 inclusive.