Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow the good senator from Queensland. It's always lovely to get an economics lecture, to get these books brought out and to get quotes from Economics 101 or Economics for Dummies. Let me bring this out. What's this? I have a book here. What is it? Oh, it's on 10 years of Liberal-National government. What does it say? It says that the Liberal-National government doubled the debt before the pandemic. It says that the Liberal-National government doubled the debt before the pandemic and left taxpayers with $1 trillion of debt when they were kicked out of office. That's what it says.

Let me quote a little bit more from this book of Senator Scarr's, 'Economics for Dummies 101': the Liberal and National parties oppose the NRF and the housing fund. I wouldn't be surprised if the Liberals and Nationals opposed more manufacturing in regional Australia. I wouldn't be surprised if the Liberals and Nationals don't support funding social and affordable housing, because the real economics lesson that Australians learned at the last election is that the Liberals and Nationals are not the economically responsible managers that they tell people they are. Australians know that this inflation crisis that we are dealing with and the real pressures that they are under are a direct result of the previous government's 10 years of messy budgets, rorts, waste and not fessing up to the Australian people about the challenges that we face. That's exactly why, when it comes to our budgets and the way we are treating the economy, the way that we are speaking to Australians, being upfront and honest with them, the Albanese government has a plan for addressing inflation challenges in the economy. It's about relief, repair and restraint—one of those words that wasn't in Senator Scarr's book. The word 'restraint' wasn't in any of the former Liberal-National budgets and it wasn't in any of the colour-coded spreadsheets.

Responsible budgets can provide and will provide cost-of-living relief. We've seen this announced already by our government. We've seen measures to deal with cost-of-living relief in the previous budget in October. I want to run through a few of those now, because these are some of the things that the Greens say we're not doing enough of when it comes to cost-of-living relief. The $14.8 billion of cost-of-living relief we are delivering in this budget—we need to deliver that, but we need to do it in a way that does not add to inflation. It's incredibly important that we do that. That's why we're doing things like making sure that we have energy bill relief for thousands of Australians—something that those opposite voted against the last time they had the opportunity. Will they vote against it again? We'll have to see. But you can't stand in here and complain about inflation and the way that it impacts on Australian families and also walk into the Senate and vote against energy bill relief. You can't do those two things, because it says you are not actually fair dinkum about making sure people have money in their pockets to pay their bills.

We're making sure that we're making changes to the single parent payment, lifting the age from eight to 14, an incredibly important measure for thousands of families, but particularly for thousands of women in Australia. We know that most families on that single parenting payment are women, and over 50,000 women will be recipients of that change. We are making sure that aged-care workers get a pay rise, a pay rise that they had to fight and scramble for under the last government. Our government is funding this pay rise for some of our hardest workers and making sure that they get the money that they deserve. We're providing skills and training funding for childcare workers to make sure that they are able to meet the demand that we will see in the future.

We're delivering cheaper child care, we're delivering cheaper medicines and we're making sure the cost-of-living relief is at the centre of our budget and the centre of our response to this inflation crisis—something that those opposite ever seem to understand, no matter how many economics degrees they have, no matter how many economics books they want to bring into the Senate, no matter how many times they want to quote from learned professors. This is about families, and that's what Labor budgets do.