Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Scarr. In net terms it was 518,000 people in one year. That's just a bit more than the size of Canberra arriving in one year. When you see, in our major cities, people living in tents and queues like you would at Dreamworld lined up in front of a standard rental house the reason is that this government has lost control of the borders. It is their job to control who comes into this country. That's the national and federal government's job. They have no plan for how to house 518,000 new people.

When we were coming out of COVID there's no doubt we had to open up our borders to let some people back in and bring skilled migrants in. But this government botched our recovery from COVID by simply opening the floodgates to whoever wanted to move to this country, with absolutely zero plan to ensure that those Australians who live here have a house and can survive, with a roof over their head. So many Australians now are unnecessarily homeless because we're taking in too many people. That's adding to our inflationary environment, especially in housing and rents.

The other situation is that the government has completely lost control of our energy markets. We're going to find out this week what energy price will be for the next year, the so-called 'default market offer'. Almost certainly they won't show a $275 reduction. This government promised when they came to power almost two years ago that they would lower electricity prices by $275. The Prime Minister promised that to the Australian people almost 100 times. Since then he hasn't said 'boo' about it because they haven't delivered it. They'll blame everyone for their problems. Apparently it's our fault for proposing nuclear energy—and we're just proposing it. That's not going to change the real world unless we're elected. They're responsible because they're the government, yet they can't explain why their policies are not having the effect they did. They blame the Ukraine war and Vladimir Putin, but that was more than two years ago. We have enormous natural resources in this country. We never before had to rely on Russia for energy security, but now we do under this Labor government, and that's because they won't tap our energy resources. If we want to get energy prices down we have to use our natural resources.

If the government could just do two things: control our borders and use our natural resources, a lot of these inflationary problems would come off the Australian people.