Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Mason has indicated, the record of the preceding 13 years of the Hawke and Keating governments was a fall in real wages of 1.2 per cent. That is what the ABS will tell you. If you want to find some other figures, Senator Cameron, you find them. That is the record of coalition governments versus Labor governments. If the first two years of the Rudd government are any indication, that comparison will continue, because clearly pressures on Australian families, through rising costs, have increased in the last two years. It ought not to be the case. To add to those pressures, as this government is contemplating by adding a new tax onto the shoulders of Australians in the form an ETS, is, I think, utterly irresponsible. That is the clear evidence of the gatekeepers, the monitors of these things—bodies like the Australian Bureau of Statistics—and the government must be held to account for its failure to deal with these issues comprehensively and properly by those sorts of measures.

If the government can satisfy this community that it has a plan to reduce those cost pressures on Australian families, we would like to hear it. We have not heard it in this debate, and the evidence of the last two years is that we are going backwards, not forwards.