Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the additional appropriation bills for 2024-2025: Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-2025, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-25 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025. These bills provide the necessary appropriations to ensure the continued delivery of essential government services and to fund decisions made since the 2024-25 budget was announced in May last year. In total, these bills appropriate approximately $12 billion for the remainder of the financial year, the majority of which, some $7 billion, is directed towards the ordinary annual services of government.

The opposition supports this legislation to ensure the smooth operation of government and the uninterrupted provision of services that the Australian people rely on. However, while we support these bills as a matter of necessity, we must also use this opportunity to highlight the grave economic mismanagement that has led us to this point and put Australians under so much cost-of-living pressure. These bills, like the budget bills before them, were introduced in the context of a budget and MYEFO update that yet again expose the Albanese Labor government's utter failure to tackle its cost-of-living crisis. The Albanese government cannot manage the economy. That is why we have seen inflation far too high for far too long. They cannot manage the budget. That is why we have seen $347 billion in additional spending that has fuelled inflation and kept rents, mortgages and the cost-of-living high for the people who we represent.

The evidence of the Albanese Labor government's failures has been mounting since they were elected back in May 2022. What do they have to show for their additional $347 billion in expenditure? What do they really have to show apart from higher prices, higher interest rates, higher rents, more small businesses collapsing—some 27,000—and lower living standards. In fact, they are saying that living standards have dropped so far under this government that it wouldn't be until the year 2030 that living standards would recover to where they were under the former coalition government.

Under the Albanese government's economic mismanagement, we are witnessing the longest sustained period of inflation since the 1980s. Interest rates have been hiked 12 times under this government alone compared to once in nine years under the former coalition government. Energy bills have risen by an average of $1,000 per household, in stark contrast to what was promised by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer prior to the last election when they said energy bills would fall by $275. They've actually risen by $1,000 per household. For businesses, the story is worse. Often, there have been 100 per cent increases. Living standards have collapsed. As I said before, businesses have gone insolvent. We are in a sustained household recession with negligible productive growth. Productivity has fallen through the floor. So for all the people that I represent, the people in Petrie, when they buy a product or get something done, what they're buying is a lot less than what it was just three years ago. That is because productivity has also collapsed.

What is the government's response to all of this? When we come into question time each day and when we hear the ministers in the media, what is their response? It's denial and indifference. The Prime Minister says to Australians, like he did in 2022: 'Trust me. You'll be better off under Labor.' Their coalition partners in the Senate, the Greens party, are also responsible for this. After 2½ years, or almost three years, now, Australians know better. Let's look at the real impact of Labor's failures on everyday Australians. The employee living cost index, an index measuring the true cost of living for hardworking Australian families, has surged by 19.4 per cent since the government took office. That is a huge jump, far outstripping any sort of wage growth or anything the government has done to try and help this situation. It's surged almost 20 per cent. That's almost 50 per cent higher than the consumer price index over the same period.

We have seen a 66 per cent increase in the number of people seeking assistance with their energy bills—just to keep the lights on at home, just to keep the wi-fi going at home. You want to relax after a big day's work and watch a bit of Netflix. We have seen people seeking assistance with energy bills, and that's not what was promised prior to the last election, when they said: 'Renewables are cheap. We're going to be a renewable energy superpower.' Have you heard that expression before from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, that we're going to be a renewable energy superpower? What's it done? It's made household bills go up by $1,000 by ensuring that all new energy is just coming from Chinese-made solar farms and wind farms. That is not working; it's not the solution. And they won't even put a cost on the additional transmission lines, the some 27,000 new lines that have been dug up through national parks and over sand dunes without, really, I think, much of an environmental impact study, because: 'It's renewables. We've just got to do it.' Bang—pop it in. The coalition has other solutions, which the Leader of the Opposition and our shadow minister for climate change and energy, Ted O'Brien, have spelt out in relation to gas, renewables and emissions-free, modern nuclear power that can be dropped in at seven locations where we currently have those transmission lines. So we can go emissions free under our policy without destroying sand dunes and national parks and running 27,000 kilometres of new poles and wires through rural and agricultural land.

At the end of the day, when you focus on Australians and what's best for them, not what's ideological about the policy, Australians are better off. When you govern just for union donors or when you govern for a small amount of people, then what happens is the policies go wrong and most Australians cop it through higher cost of living.

It's the same with the Greens; they're no different. When they say, 'Let's tax billionaires,' it all sounds good—tax millionaires, tax billionaires and everything else. But what Australians don't understand is that the students that are at university and the people that are perhaps on some sort of welfare assistance—when you tax those businesses, which are often the vehicle through which people have made their wealth through entrepreneurial activities, all of those costs of higher taxes. You see the Greens running around with 'Tax billionaires' shirts. Those higher taxes are passed on to the consumers that we represent in Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. That is the absolute reality. So it's easy for a protest party of government, like the Greens, which is not a government party, to come in and say, 'Free this, free that, free dental, free HECS, free TAFE'—whatever it might be, someone is paying for it all, and they're paying for it through higher taxes, which is how the Australian government gets its money. They don't have a money tree out the back; the Treasurer doesn't have a money tree out the back of his parliamentary office that he just plucks the billions of dollars from to bring down the budget every May, right? It comes from taxes levied on the Australian people, and what we see, every day in this place, are more and more bills coming through to find new ways to tax people.

Yesterday, we had the member for Kooyong—and don't believe me, go to the Hansard and look at what she said. She wants to tax every person in Australia that currently claims a tax deduction on a ute. She wants to tax them. That's what she said. She basically said: 'There are three million utes in Australia and only two million businesses, to round it up. Therefore, one million people must be rorting the system because they're not apprentices.' I said to the member for Kooyong, who's a teal—she says she's Independent but votes with the Greens 80 per cent of the time—that there are more people than just qualified tradespeople that use utes. What she, and others in this place, fail to understand is that farmers, for example, are not tradespeople. But guess what? They deliver food to Bendigo, to Kooyong and to Petrie, and right around the country. They use utes, and they can claim a legitimate tax deduction, as to fringe benefits tax, or on some sort of LandCruiser ute that's probably over the luxury car tax threshold—and rightly so; so they should.

This is what happens when you get elites that earn a lot of money coming in here and saying, 'Oh, we just need to tax people more.' But who cops it? The farmers cop it.

Let's say you were to take the advice of the member for Kooyong, who has written to the Treasurer saying that that tax exemption for utes should be removed. Let's say he takes that advice and the cost of utes goes up. What does that do to the price of apples, lamb or tomatoes, or pest control, or any other service where small-business people use a ute but they're not actually tradespeople? Take concreters, for example. People might want to put a driveway in for their house or a path from their back door to the clothesline. Concreters are not tradies; they haven't done a four-year apprenticeship. But they use utes as legitimate tools for their business. We need people to wake up a bit and explain how higher taxes are passed on to the people that we actually represent.

Families are struggling to keep the lights on; there's no doubt about it. Mortgage holders are facing an additional $50,000 in repayments just to keep a roof over their heads. Small businesses are closing their doors at an alarming rate. This is the reality of Labor's cost-of-living crisis, and yet, despite all of the pain and suffering, the Prime Minister hasn't offered any comfort or solutions and has no plan to ease the burden on Australians. The cost-of-living crisis we face today is not a coincidence; it is a direct result of the government's economic incompetence. Australians are crying out for relief and are saying Labor has failed them. Instead of addressing these real and pressing issues, this government continues to ignore the struggles of hardworking families and small businesses.

While we support these additional appropriation bills to ensure the continued functioning of government, we will not stand idly by while Labor's economic failures wreak havoc on Australian households. If you think it's bad now, just three months before the federal election is due, imagine what it would be like with a Labor-Greens-teal government in the next parliament, where you'd have members like the member for Kooyong and the member for Melbourne putting bills into this place with the Prime Minister. I can tell you now, it would be bad for Australia.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Disastrous.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It would be disastrous for Australia, as the member for Mallee says. I've got to shoot off that warning because the Prime Minister and his government must take responsibility for the economic damage that they have caused in the last three years. The coalition is not in government; they are. If you can't trust the leader of the country when he makes promises about lowering electricity prices, not changing stage 3 tax cuts or not putting additional taxes on superannuation that are not indexed, so that people in their early 20s are going to be impacted by the decisions of the Albanese government when they're at retirement age, then how can you trust anyone? It's no wonder that Australians get a little bit cynical about politics when people—and particularly the leader of the country—say one thing before an election and then something after. Above all, they must present a real plan: one that delivers genuine relief and restores the economic stability that Australians deserve. Until that happens, the coalition will continue to stand with the Australian people, holding this government to account and fighting for a better, more prosperous future for all Australians.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This set of appropriation bills— Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-2025, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-2025 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025—seeks appropriations for a combined $12.1 billion. We on this side of the House care greatly about how taxpayers' money is spent, and an incoming Dutton and Littleproud government will have the nation's first minister for government efficiency, in the form of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, alongside the future assistant minister for waste reduction, James Stephens. I cannot wait to see them run the ruler over every agency and find efficiencies and, of course, inefficiencies.

We know that under the Albanese government the cost of living has increased substantially and real wages are not keeping up. The coalition is committed to fighting tooth and nail for everyday Australians to find savings everywhere we can. On that front, I focus today on energy policy, because this is a government that, before they were elected, promised 97 times that they would reduce power bills permanently by $275 per annum. That promise was officially broken on 1 January this year. They hate to talk about it. It was a big promise. It was a bold promise and it is broken. Why is this promise broken? It is because this government couldn't deliver an outcome even if it was gift-wrapped on their doorstep. Yes, that's part of it. Is it broken because this is an incompetent government unready for office and showing no sign of improvement? Yes to that, too. The promise to reduce energy bills is also broken because Labor are joined at the hip with the Australian Greens political party.

Labor didn't run in the Prahran by-election for some bizarre reason, but in the seats that Labor do hold they fret about losing them to the Greens. So Labor rob regions such as mine in Mallee to buy votes in the inner cities, throwing country people under the figurative bus to save themselves from the Greens.

Labor thinks that a rapid race to a political carbon emissions reduction target is the smart thing to do. It is not. The Albanese Labor government is turning Australia into an international pariah. No nation of the geographic scale of Australia with a tiny emissions profile like Australia's is doing what this blind government is doing with 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across agricultural electorates like mine with VNI West. Almost every other developed nation is turning to zero emissions nuclear energy for the long term.

The coalition has a responsible plan for energy policy. When I look at the almost $179 million in the bill for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the $263 million-plus from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, and the $33 million for agricultural, fisheries and forestry, I wonder, for that collective taxpayer spending of in excess of $575 million, how nobody has piped up and said: What about nuclear? What about learning from the rest of the world? What about our farmers and fishers and the impact that that reckless energy policy is having on them? Either those agencies are incompetent, or this is a government so blind to its political and ideological energy target that it simply won't listen to sound advice. Worse than the direct taxpayer impact of the government spending in this bill, spending on agencies that are either incompetent or ignored by the government anyway, there are hidden costs to every taxpayer as a consequence of collective energy policy failures at state and federal levels.

In my home state of Victoria, we have a state Labor government as well as the federal Labor government zeroing in on my electorate of Mallee as Labor's dumping ground for bad policy, namely railroading small regional communities and farmers with unwanted wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines to boot. Don't buy the spin from foreign wind cowboy companies. Over 90 per cent of over 1,800 people who own, work or have close connections with farms oppose renewable projects on farmland according to a recent survey by farming advocacy group Farms for Food. Victorian Labor had six renewable energy zones in their initial plans. Now almost all the singular REZ is landing in Mallee.

While Australians struggle with the cost of living and 27,000 small businesses have gone to the wall under Labor, with energy costs a major factor in failing business viability, Labor pretends that it's $275 permanent energy reduction promise never happened. The arsonists stand there with a bucket of water, pretending they're helping. They toss into the energy crisis bonfire a one-off series of four quarterly payments to somehow nurse their wounded polling through an election. Mark my words: once the election passes, power bills will surge back up again. This government cares far, far more about its own political survival in inner-city electorates than it does about struggling Australians and battling small businesses.

Labor is dividing the Mallee with duplicated infrastructure that we will not need if we put zero-emission nuclear energy at existing coal-fired power plant sites. Labor forgets that, during the early decades of this century, energy bill payers already paid a fortune to gold-plate our transmission network. Government set reliability standards that were high in order to meet peak-demand events which might occur only a few times a year—namely, those couple of hot weeks we endured recently, when everyone is home in the evening and air conditioners are churning. Into this mix, they've thrown intermittent wind turbines, which cannot guarantee peak generation when it's hot. It's incompetency at a nearly criminal level.

The same bureaucrats and boffins in whom we are asked to invest in this bill today back in the early 2000s projected that electricity demand would keep rising. What they didn't foresee is that energy efficiency would improve and the take-up of rooftop solar panels. The gold-plating of the grid, based on false prophecies, saw us all paying early this century for new substations and transformer upgrades, more transmission and distribution lines, investment in network reliability and redundancy, and capacity for peak demand that's rarely used.

In Australia's energy policy today, we also see another clear illustration of the need to revisit where we a federation stand as when it comes to responsibility. Energy policy is nobody's direct responsibility, just like health policy, as I find all the time as shadow assistant minister for regional health. The national energy arrangements, like the Australia Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Market Operator, are set up under national, not federal, arrangements. Australia's energy policy is an accountability vacuum, and we all pay as a result.

The former coalition government intervened in this accountability vacuum by creating what is now known as the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner. The first commissioner was Andrew Dyer. Andrew retired relatively recently from the role, and let me put on record my appreciation for his work. I connected with Andrew and, in turn, connected him with Mallee farmers and landholders who are being railroaded by Labor governments and harassed by the foreign energy cowboys Labor has enticed into regional Australia, stirring up bad blood in regional communities and families. Andrew called out those cowboys and sought greater regulation of their behaviour. This has not happened.

The unreliability of Labor's energy plan is writ large when you look at the recent collapse of a wind turbine in Berrybank, south of my electorate. These foreign energy cowboys are proposing turbines as tall as 280 metres, which is just 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne. Each turbine, at 280 metres tall, would clock in at number seven in the list of tallest structures in the nation, behind the Sydney and Q1 towers, Australia 108 in Melbourne and three naval communication towers.

But wait. It gets worse. A German company is planning to build a turbine 364 metres tall to the tip of its blades. If we had those in Australia, that would be the equal second-highest building in the nation. It's out of sight and out of mind from those inner-city electorates where Labor is competing against the Greens and teal candidates. Labor proposes pincushioning electorates like Mallee with massive turbines. After the Berrybank turbine collapse and other recent safety incidents, you have to ask whether turbines are safe or good for the environment—let alone the potentially devastating impact on agricultural primary industry.

Labor is happy to transform Mallee into an industrial wasteland. The Victorian government has removed from their 2022 report an item that says without offshore wind generation, Labor will need up to 70 per cent of Victoria's agricultural land for their renewable energy objectives. Don't worry: I kept a copy of the document, though they've removed it.

With offshore wind in Victoria on the rocks, you could see the wind turbine map of electorates like Mallee rapidly turning into a pincushion. Australians are feeling the pain of this reckless energy transition in their energy bills and will continue to do so. As the coalition revealed late last year, Labor's renewables-only plan will cost almost $600 billion, with the coalition's responsible energy transition being 44 per cent cheaper, at $263 billion. Moody's, late last week, confirmed Labor's energy plan could cost up to $230 billion over the next 10 years alone and drive household electricity prices up another 25 per cent in that time.

This is yet another independent warning that Chris Bowen's renewables-only approach will continue to hurt Australians, forcing families and businesses to the wall. Chris Bowen promised wholesale prices of $51 per megawatt hour in 2025, but the reality is that Australians' quarterly prices have been in excess of $100 per megawatt hour over the past year.

Energy policy failures are why regional Australians are urging their city cousins to desert the Labor-Greens-teal axis, whom, I must add, are backed by the energy barons of Climate 200, the very enablers of this destruction in not only our regional landscapes and lifestyles but our environments. I can only hope the expenditure in this bill might go towards departments and staff who will call out this nonsense on behalf of regional Australians—salt-of-the-earth, hardworking farmers like Glenden Watts, Ben Duxon, Tess Healy, Barry Batters, Gerald Feeney, Andrew Weidemann, Ross Johns and too many more to mention from my electorate who didn't choose this fight. It chose them, and they are fighting. I am fighting alongside them, and I'm grateful to Peta Credlin from Sky News for giving them a platform. I look forward to hosting Peta and shadow minister Ted O'Brien in Mallee before the election to show all Australians the human face and cost of reckless energy policy and the alternatives at our fingertips.

Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on these bills, the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-25, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-2025 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025. These bills do, of course, provide the necessary appropriations to ensure the continued delivery of essential government services and to fund decisions made since the 2024-25 budget was announced in May last year. In total, these bills appropriate $12 billion for the remainder of the financial year, the majority of which, some $7 billion, is directed towards the ordinary annual services of government. The coalition supports this legislation to ensure the smooth operation of government and the uninterrupted provision of services upon which Australians rely.

However, while we support these bills as a matter of necessity, we must also use this opportunity to highlight the grave economic mismanagement that has led us to this point and put Australians under so much cost-of-living pressure. These bills, like the budget bills before them, were introduced in the context of a budget and MYEFO update that yet again exposed the Albanese Labor government's utter failure to tackle our current cost-of-living crisis. We need to get Australians back on track—

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate will be resumed at a later hour and the member will be granted leave to continue their remarks when the debate is resumed.