Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate will now consider the proposal from Senator O'Sullivan, which is also shown at item 16 on today's Order of Business:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

The need for Prime Minister Albanese to prioritise helping Australian households and small businesses deal with the cost of living crisis.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The matter of public importance that I've proposed here today is for the Senate to take a look and recognise the fact that Prime Minister Albanese needs to prioritise helping Australian households and small businesses deal with the cost-of-living crisis. Anyone that's spending any time in the community speaking to any Australian recognises that this is the single biggest issue that Australians are facing right now. It's not just those that are on low incomes; it's affecting people right through to the upper bands of the middle incomes and even some on higher incomes. It's a cost-of-living crisis that is impacting upon every Australian, yet this Prime Minister has proven that he is distracted and that he is not capable of dealing with multiple things at once, like a Prime Minister should be able to do. A government should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but this government is proving that it is not even capable of doing that. They've just held this referendum, and a resounding decision was made. A resounding position was given by the Australian people to this government to get back to focusing on the things that are really going to impact on their lives. But it's worse than the fact that the government can't do multiple things at once. The issue is they don't have a reasonable, sensible, workable plan to address this cost-of-living crisis. It's not just that they're not capable of doing a few things at once; they don't even have a plan that's reasonable, that's sensible, that's workable and that's going to deliver on addressing this rampant inflation that we've got.

Australians know that petrol prices are going up and rental prices are going up. Their mortgages have gone up. Australians are being forced to spend significantly more for the critical items that they need, like their groceries. I mentioned fuel—insurance has gone through the roof. Energy and housing prices have gone through the roof. Australians are spending on these things rather than the things that they really want.

I want to read a statement from the RBA on its decision to keep October interest rates unchanged at 4.1 per cent. They said:

… the economy is still experiencing a period of below-trend growth and this is expected to continue for a while. High inflation is weighing on people's real incomes and household consumption growth is weak, as is dwelling investment … High inflation makes life difficult for everyone and damages the functioning of the economy.

That's what they said. Now listen to this. They said:

It erodes the value of savings, hurts household budgets, makes it harder for businesses to plan and invest, and worsens income inequality.

This is why inflation should have been and needs to be the absolute No. 1 priority of the government, but they're lost at sea, and it is impacting Australians.

Australians are hurting right now, but this government is distracted by all sorts of other things, like, for example, industrial relations reform that is really just aimed at increasing the union grip on and control over the workplaces of Australia. That's what this government has planned for the industrial relations system, because it's not truly addressing the issues. They could be quite precisely dealing with some of the matters that relate to the industrial relations system, but instead they've got this broad-brush response that is going to cruel business. It will drive down employment in this country. If you're a casual, forget about it under this government. If you want flexibility in the workplace, forget about it under this government. If you have to work a second job to make ends meet, forget about it under this government. They're completely lost at sea. They've been distracted, but their plans are not actually addressing the issues.

We've seen productivity growth at a seven-year low, and there's nothing that this government is doing to address productivity. Real wages are going backwards, because all wages are doing is chasing the high inflation that the government is creating by its economic measures, which are not actually helping people to address their cost of living. This government is lost at sea, it's distracted and it needs to get focused, because it's hurting people.

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

Well, isn't it interesting? I don't think there's a person—certainly on this side—who doesn't have a concern about how tight it is out there in household budgets at the moment. The reason I say 'on this side' is that we actually understand that there are cost-of-living pressures and that inflation is being felt at kitchen tables around the country, but obviously those on the other side don't know that, because, instead of supporting relief, the coalition keep putting up roadblocks. Instead of having answers, they're aimless. Their only answer is to say no. They say no to the lowering of power prices. We introduced coal and gas price caps, easing the pressure on energy bills. Then those opposite turn around and say no. They said no to energy bill relief. In partnership with states, we are delivering rebates for around five million households and one million small businesses. They've said no to better pay and more secure jobs for Australian workers.

Of course, those on the opposite side want to say this is some sort of class war, but the actual battle, the actual argument, is between good employers who do the right thing and bad employers who are happy to rip people off by not giving them an ethical, fair return on their labour, whether those people be small-business people, owner-drivers, gig workers or employees. Good companies doing the right thing are being unfairly competed with by the companies that are always on the opposite side, always on the side of making sure we make it as tough as we can, rather than lifting all boats.

When you start talking about those who are on the good side of business, you have to talk about people like Peter Anderson, the national secretary of the Australian Road Transport Industrial Organisation, representing small, medium and large businesses across this country in transport. He says about the laws that are proposed, 'Our unity shows how critical it is for the federal parliament to pass reform into law to give all industry participants a fighting chance.' They'll hate this, but Michael Kaine from the Transport Workers Union—the head of the largest small-business organisation in this country—says, 'Life-saving transport reform is the answer, and the federal parliament is being asked by the entire industry to pass it into law.' As small-business representatives, employee representatives and other business representatives are saying, we need laws to change to make our businesses safer, more secure and more viable. But that doesn't fit with the politics on the other side, because they want fights between capital and labour. They want to pretend they're on the capital side when the reality is that lots of good operating businesses want reforms. They want fair reforms. Warren Clark of the National Road Transport Association had some different views some years back but now is one of the leading lights in saying there needs to be reform so that we can bolster and build productivity and enhance safety for everyone. The National Road Freighters Association has taken a very similar position for its owner-drivers, who are providing long distance transport in some of the toughest places to work in across the country.

When you start looking at those people, it just gripes me to think that they say they're so worried about the pressure on households. They said no to 30,000 new social and affordable homes, including for victims of domestic violence. They've said no, more broadly, to better pay and more secure jobs for Australian workers. They've even had Tania Constable, from the Minerals Council of Australia, get up at an inquiry into the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023 and say that they were actually paying labour hire workers more money than they were paying direct hire workers. In fact, she said, it was $300 extra a week. But wait a minute. It was only some weeks ago they were saying it was going to cost the mining industry billions of dollars. On the one hand she is putting to everybody that it's $300 better for those workers. On the other hand it's costing billions of dollars. It does not compute. The fact is, with those on the other side, some of the big business that they back in this country—not the good big business but bad business, in the mining industry—are frightened to turn around and call them out for the prejudice that they've brought to the table in this debate.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

First and foremost, I want to point out the sheer hypocrisy. The opposition suddenly care about the cost of living now, when they're in opposition. But, in the nine years they were in power, what did we actually see to help everyday Australians? Absolutely nothing. We saw rorts of multiple forms, tax cuts for the rich and leg-ups for the multimillion-dollar companies that they support. I'm glad the opposition finally caught up to the fact that the major parties might actually have to start caring about people, but unfortunately for them it is too late. I hope that they remember, when they come into government again, if they don't have selective amnesia, that it is the everyday Australian that is currently struggling. I really hope that their having brought on this MPI means that this is a sustainable memory for them.

I've done a lot of travelling in the past month, especially in Western Australia. One thing that not just shocked but also appalled me was how prices were absolutely so high, particularly the more remote that I went. I'll give you an example. In Roebourne, for a litre of milk today, it costs $7. We wonder why we see an increase in preventable deaths in some of those communities. Prices are forcing people to consume not just what they can find but also what they can afford, which often doesn't add up to your basic healthy diet with fruit and vegetables. There is a lot of processed food, full of sugar, salt and God knows what else out in those communities. This is something that the people are being forced into because of the cost-of-living pressures. This is not the individuals' fault; people are simply doing the best they can to get by. When I talk to people on the ground, they are saying: 'Where do we turn for these solutions? No-one is offering any of those up.'

The issue is also with the corporations that are profiting off the cost-of-living crisis. The issue is the major parties uniting to keep people on income support and in poverty. The issue is with the lack of investment in our rural communities right across this country. Of course something needs to be done to help people in this cost-of-living crisis, but I am telling those folks out there watching: Don't be fooled that this MPI today brought on by the coalition means that they will be the ones that deliver the long-term solutions that are actually required to solve this.' They will not be the ones offering up the solutions. They didn't do it while they were in government and they're certainly not going to do it now.

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

The failed Albanese Voice referendum is the latest spit in the face Australians have had to cop from the government. At a time when bills are going up and bank accounts are going backwards, Australians are going to be furious when they hear how much Anthony Albanese's Labor government just wasted on a referendum. All I can say is: brace yourself for the answer. Four hundred and fifty million dollars—that's how much the Australian Electoral Commission is estimating last week's referendum cost. If you woke up with a hangover after some celebrations on the weekend and were scared to check your bank account, spare a moment to think about the Australian Electoral Commission. If their estimates are correct, the AEC have blown their budget for the referendum by nearly $100 million. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, Anthony Albanese has blown $450 million, almost half a billion dollars, on his personal vanity project.

What did Australians get for this? Australians rightly rejected inserting racial division into the Constitution, with a thumping victory for the 'no' case. Not a single state reached a majority yes. Only the small Canberra territory, the bubble, recorded a 'yes' majority. The 'yes' side spewed divisive, racial, abusive rhetoric while claiming the high moral ground. The country is worse off for being put through this divisiveness, at a huge cost and for a proposal that should never have been put forward.

Australia rightly asks: why is this Voice issue distracting government as mortgage payments skyrocket, grocery bills shock budgets and life continues to get tougher? Why was dangerous virtue signalling the government's top priority? Why? I'm saddened to be the one to break the answer to you: this government does not care about you.

While I thank the Liberals for bringing on this matter of importance and allowing us to discuss it, they weren't any better in government. Honestly, the Liberals put a wrecking ball through the economy and handed it over to the Labor government in one of the greatest hospital passes in political history, yet Labor doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of navigating us out of this one. Neither the Liberal Party nor the Labor Party can fix the cost-of-living crisis because they're both committed to the UN's net zero pipedream that caused the cost-of-living crisis.

This government is committed to net zero by 2050. They may as well be committed to driving us all off a cliff. If we keep going down this path, the number of Australians who can pay their power bills will be next to zero.

Australia doesn't have to do this by ourself and find out the hard way. We can learn from many other countries further down this pipedream path than we are. Every other country that's tried to force their power grid onto wind and solar has had their power prices go up by a proportionate amount. When plotted on a graph, it's nearly a straight line heading upwards, and it's all for nothing.

The hard data shows that Australians' carbon dioxide production cannot affect the climate above natural variability. The lie that wind and solar are cheaper is easily debunked by fact—this fact: with more wind, solar, batteries and hydro on the grid than ever in our history, power bills have never been higher. It's all a crock designed to fill the pockets of parasitic billionaire wind and solar proponents, fraudulently taking subsidies and donating to people in this Senate who support wind and solar. Australians have already paid billions in subsidies to these billionaire predators and pay again as their power bills skyrocket. Yet Labor, the Liberals and even the fake farmer friends, the Nationals, are all committed to the UN's net zero by 2050.

After all the talk about truth telling, here's some cold hard truth: the cost-of-living crisis cannot end until we ditch the United Nations' net zero plans. One Nation is the only party that accepts those facts and can deliver cheaper power bills for Australia, turn the coal fired power generators back on, cut all the subsidies with the parasitic wind and solar industry and just get back to common sense, hard data and truth.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the fact that the Albanese Labor government has no solutions for the cost-of-living crisis and for the first 16 months of their term in government they have wasted $400 million on an idea that went up in smoke. It was something that the Australian people never asked for and never wanted, and on the weekend they voted a resounding no to the Voice, yet Anthony Albanese and his little narrowminded view of the world thought that we needed to divide this country by race. What a disgrace.

What makes it even worse is the fact that we have been going through a cost-of-living crisis, brought about by a COVID overreach, an energy crisis and all of these bad government policies driving up the cost of living, and the Prime Minister's response has been to focus on feelings rather than facts. The facts of the matter are this: the Australian people are doing it tough. They are doing it tough.

It's about time we saw the Albanese Labor government provide some solutions for the rental crisis. But what's their solution? Higher immigration, which is all designed to aid and abet the inner-city Marxists who teach at our universities so that our students can come out and graduate brainwashed and bankrupt. They are the only people benefiting from immigration. Of course it might help Labor get a few more votes, because God knows anyone who has lived in this country long enough knows you would never vote Labor if you want to hold onto your hard-earned wages. If they're not stealing it through your taxes, they're stealing it through superannuation, and, if they're not stealing it through superannuation, they're stealing it through higher energy prices.

I say that it is about time the Labor government actually started to focus on the thing that matters to the Australian people. That is, they want to keep their hard-earned wages in their pockets. We have a rental crisis, or a housing crisis, brought about by high immigration and an out-of-control RBA whose only solution to anything is to increase the cost of interest. There's no talk about issuing new shares and building new infrastructure to increase the supply of energy, water, transport and better roads. No, no. All they can do is impose austerity upon the Australian people.

We have an energy crisis as well. Power prices are through the roof. The Labor government love to blame it on what's going on in Ukraine, but here's the thing: Australia has abundant reserves of coal, gas and nuclear. Why don't we use our own homegrown resources to supply the raw materials needed to produce energy? No, no. The Labor government would rather import renewables built overseas and shut down our own local industries. That is a disgrace. That is an absolute disgrace.

We have the cost-of-living crisis compounded by the rental crisis and the energy crisis, and then we have Labor's obsession with red tape, green tape, blue tape and all these fees and costs that everyone has to comply with in order to get any business done in this country. We've seen that with IR laws that are actually going to make it harder to do business. We see that with so many other aspects in the economy where Labor wants to impose command and control over every aspect of an individual's or a business's decision-making process. We could supply more services into the economy, such as more power stations, whether it be coal, gas or nuclear, or build more dams so we can have more water on our beautiful black soil across all parts of Australia, to supply more food, or, heaven forbid, have cheaper energy to restart our manufacturing process. Do Labor want to do anything about that? No. They want to increase the superannuation rate so that workers pay more money to the rent-seeking, white-collar parasites in their ivory palaces in Sydney and Melbourne and other means of doing business as well.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to 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.

Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Clearly, to the Australian people, Labor's gig is up. We said before the last election they had no economic plan, and, sadly for our nation, every single day they have demonstrated they still have no economic plan for our nation.

Over halfway through their term, what are they doing? The only things they have implemented are policies handed to them by the trade union movement and by the left of the Labor Party—and we've seen that tragically play out in the divisive referendum this nation has just gone through and in the frightening industrial relations legislation they failed to tell the Australian people about before the last election. You have a look at any other policy, and it's not just the absence of an economic policy; they wasted nine years in opposition not developing a single policy. In defence, reviews for nearly two years and no action. In emergency management, a royal commission—an implementable thing straight away; they're still doing two reviews. There has been probably the most criminal lack of action on the NDIS in its history, and nearly two years later they will still be reviewing while the scheme is in trouble.

Most importantly for all Australians, in particular Western Australians, this government has no economic plan. It is true—and this government is, sadly, still demonstrating—that under every Labor government over the last 30 years, on average, Labor have delivered higher unemployment, higher interest rates, higher electricity prices and higher taxes—and now higher inflation and cost of living for just about everything for Australian families. And they're sitting there dealing with everything else but the actions that will drive down the cost of living for Australians. In fact, they are pump-priming the economy to make inflation even higher and the cost of living even higher for Australians.

Taming inflation should be the government's first, second and third priority, but it is not. Families right across Australia, including in Senator O'Sullivan's and my home state of Western Australia, are doing it incredibly tough. Both Senator O'Sullivan and I have visited Foodbank many times, and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see what is happening. For every single interest rate rise—10 or 11 under Labor—Foodbank sees a significant increase in access to its food supplies. Most importantly and most sadly, over 70 per cent of the people they are now assisting are people who have never had to seek support before; they are two-income families who are absolutely struggling under the cost-of-living pressures this government continues to inflict.

This year alone, over 116,000 children in Western Australia live in severely-food-insecure households. There were 208,000 households in Western Australia that went hungry—can you believe this? In Western Australia, over 200,000 households went hungry in the last 12 months due to a lack of money and having to skip meals, sometimes going for days without eating. And 23 per cent of households in Western Australia with mortgages experienced food insecurity in the last year. This is completely and utterly outrageous.

It's not only the cost of living and people finding it very difficult to feed their families. The cost of petrol under this government has skyrocketed to, somewhere in WA, over $2 a litre—an increase of over 10 per cent. Many families, and particularly the elderly, are no longer able to use their cars because they cannot afford the cost of petrol.

Housing is such an important issue, and it is such a challenging issue for far too many West Australians. Home rental prices in Perth have increased by nearly 20 per cent in the last 12 months alone. That is a complete and utter disgrace. Despite all of the rhetoric from those opposite about homelessness, the number of people sleeping rough in Western Australia has increased by over 100 per cent since Labor came to government. Perth has the tightest vacancy rate, and so it goes, on and on. Western Australians simply cannot afford this Labor government, and shame on you for doing— (Time expired)

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for this discussion has expired.