Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

or GROGAN () (): This really is quite the fascinating debate. I think, if you had sat in this place over the course of the last decade under the coalition government, particularly in those dying years, it would have been pretty easy to forget what good government actually looks like. So we do understand how confused you are when you look at the budget that was delivered yesterday and you see a balanced and sensible budget, but hang around long enough and maybe you'll learn something. Good government is all about pulling the right levers at the right time and making sure we balance all of the various areas of the budget. As the Treasurer said last night, we sought in all decisions to strike a considered and methodical balance. We need to exercise restraint and keep the pressure off inflation, but we also need to help those people out there who are struggling and ensure that vital services like Medicare and NDIS are delivered to those Australians who need them. Labor has delivered a budget that relieves that pressure. We've delivered a budget that is meaningful and that has significant cost-of-living relief for Australian households.

Senator Sheldon has given a good list of the kinds of things we have in that budget to assist Australians, including with their power bills and health costs, supporting vulnerable Australians, creating more affordable housing and boosting wages. Regardless of the stunts and the grandstanding that we've seen today in this place, ordinary Australians are relieved to have seen a balanced budget that will genuinely make a difference to their lives. We don't pretend that everything has been fixed here at all. Not in any of the commentary yesterday did we claim that we've reached some sort of utopia. But, on the back of the chaos that we have seen, the challenges within the budget when we came to government and the things that we have had to fix, we have taken that first significant step that will fix the challenges that we've seen in this country over some time.

I have been on the Select Committee on the Cost of Living over a number of months, and what became very clear to me in the first raft of hearings for that committee was that the Labor government inherited climbing energy prices due, in large part, to the energy policy chaos from those opposite. We confirmed that with the expert witnesses and the witnesses with lived experience. We also saw quite clearly from the housing experts and the housing peak bodies that the Labor government inherited a dramatic housing supply shortage due, in part, to the inaction of those opposite. On every level, in every function of that committee, we have seen that this crisis—claimed by those around me to have popped up miraculously on 21 May last year—was about long-term structural problems that had been baked into the budget by chaos and inattention and ideological beliefs.

One of the things that is really critical and topical today as we desperately try to debate the Housing Affordability Future Fund is where we are going on housing. It's such a critical issue. We need to do more on housing. The Labor government is aiming to do more on housing but we are getting blocked by our colleagues in this place. And who is standing in the way? The Liberal Party, the National Party and the Greens. One lot thinks that a $10 billion investment is too small to be worth the effort and so they would rather have nothing. The others think it is too easy to mismanage a $10 billion housing fund. Newsflash—you make be the rorting pinnacle of Australian politics, but we are Labor and we are in government and there will be no mismanagement of that fund. The Housing Australia Future Fund is a critical nation-building fund that will deliver critical housing that we desperately need in this country, and right now we are standing in this chamber with each of the other political parties—the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Greens party—intending to block $10 billion in housing.