David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The cost of living is a huge issue in communities across the country. I recently did a survey of almost 2,000 Canberrans, and the cost of living came out as No. 1. It is affecting households and small businesses. We heard this morning from small businesses that they are facing a double whammy, because they are facing increased costs in their small business at the same time that their mortgage is going up. And we know how leveraged many small businesses are.

There are a number of things that can be done by the parliament to deal with this. There are solutions. Firstly, we can look at competition. The recent inquiry into Qantas has laid bare the need for better competition laws in this country. Where you've got, in the airline industry, 95 per cent market share between Qantas and Virgin, with Qantas walking away with 80 per cent of the profits, something is wrong. We need to step in and ensure there is more competition. It's not just airlines. That should be the starting point. We've got two grocery chains with 70 per cent market share, three dominant energy retailers, and four major banks with 75 per cent of mortgages. The list goes on. It's a failure of policy to ensure that people are getting a better deal.

Housing clearly underpins the cost-of-living crisis. We've seen both major parties not want to talk about what can be done when it comes to housing policy that is set up for housing not to be a human right that people in our communities should be able to afford but to be an investment vehicle. Those have been the rules; people have used them. But we have to turn this ship around. We have to ensure that people in our communities can afford to have a safe place to call home.

Another solution is electrification. We know that households and small businesses can save thousands of dollars a year when they electrify. With the cost of fuel going to foreign oil companies, that money can be saved and spent in our local communities. There are solutions ready to go. We need policymakers to step up and put in place policies that ensure that households and small businesses can benefit from electrification and that nobody is left behind.

In the US we saw the Inflation Reduction Act—an ambitious wide-ranging policy, with a big part of it focused on electrification and ensuring the gap between electric and fossil fuel is bridged so that people can unlock the savings now rather than in the future. I would urge the government to come up with a bold, comprehensive response to the Inflation Reduction Act.