Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Treasurer, the ABC reported in October that we're officially a vanishing race, with birthrates halving as families struggle to make ends meet and the cost of starting a family simply out of reach. Will you implement your own advocacy with a federal overriding of the states' regulatory impositions—impositions that strangle home building—break up the cold and worthless duopoly, delivering a 30 per cent reduction in food prices, and get real lairy, enforcing Morris Iemma's ethanol initiative and resilient petrol prices—$1.10 a litre? Treasurer, can you join Red Ted and Black Jack on the wall of fame by turning Australia off our current highway to extinction?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the honourable member for Kennedy for his question. Birthrates are down. This has been a long-term trend. Australia's total fertility rate fell to 1½ in 2023. It's down from 1.63. It's also been a trend around the world, though our fertility rate is above most advanced countries. The UK is at 1.44. Canada is at 1.26. This is one of the reasons why our population is ageing, and this is one of the big long-term trends identified not just in my intergenerational report but in those handed down by predecessors, including those opposite.

We don't tell people what to do or make decisions for people when it comes to their own family circumstances, but we do know that the cost of living is a big factor, as the member for Kennedy rightly points out. It's expensive to have kids, and people make their own decisions for their own reasons, but we're doing what we can to make it easier for people to choose to have more kids if they want to do that.

Our investments in early childhood education, health care, extending paid parental leave, paying super on it and lowering student debts are all about making it easier for people to have more kids if they want to. We acknowledge, as the member for Kennedy did, that housing is a big part of the story here. We've got a big ambitious plan, and I think, as the housing minister has herself acknowledged, we do need the states to do their bit as well. The whole cabinet is focused on these cost-of-living challenges, but I particularly wanted to shout out Ministers Rishworth, Gallagher, O'Neil, Clare and Aly for their work.

All of our cost-of-living measures are about taking the pressure off people and making it easier for them to make these kinds of decisions: a tax cut for every taxpayer, energy bill relief, cheaper medicines, child care, more rent assistance and real wages moving again. When it comes to supermarkets, we are taking action to ensure a fair go for farmers and for families. I acknowledge the passion that the member for Kennedy has for that as well. Our focus here is on improving competition, stopping anticompetitive mergers and accelerating mergers that help with competition.

So we're coming at this cost-of-living challenge from every conceivable and every responsible angle. We don't tell people what to do and we don't tell people how to make their own decisions about their own family circumstances, but the No. 1 focus of this government is to ease the cost of living where we can do that so that people can make their own decisions about whether to have kids and how many kids that they want to have, recognising that the fertility rate in Australia has been dropping, as the member for Kennedy rightly identifies in his question.