Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The reason that we're having this debate today is that when you are the government for vested interests you don't have any time to deal with the major challenges that are facing the Australian people; you only have time to work through the narrow vested interests that are being set out for you by your great supporters, benefactors and donors. We have seen since the election an effort to work through the laundry list of grievances from unions, super funds and class action law firms. We have seen the effort to put in place multi-employer, or pattern, bargaining. We have seen the efforts to line the coffers of super funds. We have seen the efforts to remove transparency from workers so they can't see how much money the super funds are sending off to the unions. And we have seen just in recent weeks this hilarious idea of a housing fund, where we want the super funds to give more money so they can buy more houses, but, of course, the people themselves are banned from buying houses with their own money. This is the bizarre world of the government's vested interests, where if you are a union or a superfund you get the rolled gold treatment but if you are a punter you can forget about it.

The consequence of the narrow focus here is that the government hasn't been able to deal with inflation. We have seen 10 interest rate rises since the election. A mortgage holder with a $750,000 mortgage will now be paying at least $1,500 additionally each month. That has been massively fuelled by Canberra. The government is fuelling inflation. The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, has warned that the use of off-balance-sheet items has fuelled inflation and is a risk to our budget and our economy. Inflation is at a 33-year high. Canberra and the Labor Party are massively fuelling inflation because Canberra and the Labor Party are addicted to massive spending projects off the balance sheet but also through the budget itself.

So we have seen $45 billion in off-balance-sheet items, the reconstruction slush fund for unions, the housing fund and the rewiring fund, but there are also tens of billions of dollars in new expenditure locked into the budget with the bills that have passed the parliament since the election. So you have a government that is heavily invested in enriching its favourite vested interests through policy proposals, but you have also got a government that is committed to fuelling inflation perhaps not deliberately but because it can't seem to restrain expenditure. It is prepared to ignore the IMF and the independent observers here. It continues to bring bills before the parliament. There are now bills before the parliament to establish the union slush fund, the reconstruction fund and the housing fund. We just considered the housing fund at the economics committee this week, and we will be reporting later today or tomorrow. This is another $10 billion. Again, going against the warnings of the IMF, the government has decided that it will fuel inflation.

Then we hear the Labor Party people come into the Senate and read out their pieces of papers with their talking points about how bad the Morrison government and other governments were. Sure, there were many bad things in the past, but the reality is that the pandemic was managed as well as it could have been from an economic viewpoint. The Labor opposition wanted to pay people to get vaccinations. The Labor opposition wanted to pay JobKeeper to foreigners and universities. We won't forget that because, effectively, the idea of extending JobKeeper and then paying it to foreigners was a ridiculous proposition at the time and it was ruled out of order. Then Labor will say, 'You switched off too quickly.' But Dr Leigh—or Minister Leigh, as he now is—has gone through and done a forensic examination of all this sort of stuff. We will come back to this in the next episode.

Question agreed to.