Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in March 2023. It's just two short months away from May 2023, when we will the first-year anniversary of this government and we'll see their second budget delivered. They are under pressure now. They have a test, from the Australian people, as to how they handle the cost-of-living crisis that is ravaging Australian families. Small businesses, individuals and families, in particular, are under extraordinary pressure. You do have to wonder, given the answers we've heard in this place and the other place, whether this government has any clue as to what to do to the cost-of-living pressures that families are under.

Senator Gallagher, the Minister for Finance, has been asked on numerous occasions—probably more numerous than she'd like to count in this place—what the government is doing to alleviate cost-of-living pressures. The only things she can name are policies that the Labor Party announced prior to the last election, prior to the record rises in interest rates and the rapidity of those rises that we've seen over the past 10 months. In fact, most of those policies that she cites as alleviating cost-of-living pressures were announced in 2021—before we saw rises in interest rates, before we saw the rampant inflation that is present in this country. It was at a time when the Labor Party was still promising people real wage increases, which they haven't delivered. The Australian people are watching the Labor Party in the upcoming budget.