Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thankfully, we're on the same track. I misunderstood what you were saying because of the complicated way you said it. So thank you for agreeing with me. Those companies, just as we are rightly doing, are going to take action, because the ABCC never took action. That goes to my point about what the good senator raised just then, because we put a proposition about how to move forward.

I will also just jump to a critical issue that was raised during the questions on the cost of living. I'm going to run through this pretty quickly. We know people are doing it tough, but on 1 July 2024 we saw tax cuts come into place, and Sussan Ley, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, says she wants to scrap them; 2.6 million low-paid workers will get their third consecutive pay rise, but the Liberals and Nationals oppose it. The Liberals and Nationals opposed the increase to the minimum wage in 2022 and in 2023. The member for New England, Barnaby Joyce, said that someone earning another $110 a week more is just 'window-dressing'. Labor's cheaper medicine policy saved families $63 million in 2023 in my state of New South Wales alone. Labor's 60-day prescriptions will save patients more than $1.6 billion over four years, up until 2027. The Liberals and Nationals opposed cheaper medicines because they said it would cause pharmacies to close. There's been electricity bill relief, and the average family would have been $230 worse off in 2023-24 without Labor's energy price relief, but the coalition voted against it. And the list goes on.