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

While my colleagues yell at each other across the chamber down there, I might also talk about the cost of living. I have spent some time on the Select Committee on the Cost of Living, and one of the key things that I think are challenging is the construct of the Liberal-National family across the benches here, who insist in many of those hearings that all of our problems started on 22 May 2022, which obviously they cannot believe, because if they did then they would not be fit to be sitting on those benches, and I know many of them are much smarter than that.

The issues we are facing did not start on 22 May 2022 when the Labor government was elected. We know that. Through the hearings that we have had for the Cost of Living Select Committee, we have heard people say, over and over again, that this is the result of 'years of X' or 'decades of Y'. They're not saying that this is happening because the government changed at one point in time. Let's take housing, for example. How on earth do you totally upend the housing system overnight? You don't. The housing crisis and the lack of anywhere for people to live comes after years and years of inaction and not building any houses. It's not difficult. It's not a difficult concept to understand. One of the fundamental problems here is this absolutism of, 'Oh, it can only be your fault because you're now sitting in government.'

We are totally responsible. This is why we have worked towards a suite of policies that addresses a whole range of issues that we have come to government to find in a riotous mess. We have laid out 10 critical areas that we are working on. Firstly, there's electricity bill relief. We know that there's more to do, but we have managed to moderate the increases in that arena, and we have made some significant steps forward in impacting the price that people are paying for their electricity. There's cheaper child care. That's already implemented, and we know it's having a significant effect. The third thing is increased rent assistance. Yes, we did that, too. I note that Senator Scarr was talking about people on unemployment benefits and support payments, and, yes, we've increased those as well. Boosting income support payments is obviously something that needed to be done, but the situation that we are seeing in that whole social support network has been festering for years and years. Fee-free TAFE is the next one down our list. We've put an awful lot of effort into it, and it's having a significant impact. More people, more training and more jobs—that's what we've been seeing on the ground since we came to government.

In terms of building more affordable homes, there's the accusation that the housing circumstances have occurred overnight, which we know is a completely ridiculous claim, after 10 years of that area just being ignored. We have brought in policies that are seeing houses being put on the ground right now to help ease that crisis. Expanding paid parental leave is an economic policy that is about getting women back into the workforce and shoring up their economic independence. And then we have the situation with our healthcare system. We know that we've seen—was it for six or seven years that the Liberals froze the Medicare rebate, crippling our doctors on the way? We are now seeing more people being able to access bulk billing. We have tripled some of those rates. We are seeing 11 million people now finding it much easier to find a doctor who will bulk bill them.

That is a lot of people who are seriously impacted by the policies that we are putting on the ground to ease the cost-of-living pressures that we're seeing. I would say to those opposite: stop playing games. Let's just get down and get this done. We need to do some serious work on fixing the cost of living.