Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is no more important issue facing Australians than the rising cost of living under the Albanese Labor government. It's not the Voice referendum, which the Prime Minister is prioritising over millions of Australian families facing poverty and the many thousands facing homelessness. That's after his vote-buying false promise at the election to reduce energy costs. Australians' energy bills have never been higher thanks directly to the Labor Party government. Immigration has never been higher than it is under this Labor government, and it is directly responsible for the high demand driving the housing, rental and homelessness crisis. This includes 250,000 foreign students who occupy seven out of every 10 new Australian homes. Arresting inflation has led to huge increases in mortgage payments, forcing many families to sell their homes and try their luck in a rental market with vacancy rates lower than one per cent.

Instead of dealing with this appalling state of affairs, this Labor government produced a wellness budget using highly subjective and out-of-date information from before the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd be interested to know how much this worthless document cost. It actually concluded that mortgage stress in Australia was decreasing, if you can believe that. All evidence shows that wellness primarily flows from the prosperity created by a growing national economy with high productivity. Our economy may be growing with this artificial record immigration, but our productivity is going down the drain. This government needs to start doing its job rather than wasting time and money on subjective reports full of self-adulation that say and achieve absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, it's the governments who drive the economy, and all I've seen is it going down under both governments.