Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate notes that the Albanese Labor Government has lost its way and Australians are paying the price because of the Prime Minister's inability to control rampant inflation, as well as his broken promises to cut electricity bills, to provide cheaper mortgages and that families will be better off.

During the 2022 election, many in this place and the broader public will remember a catchy and maybe even sometimes a little bit annoying slogan used by the Liberal Party which said, 'It won't be easy under Albanese.' It's been 2½ years since that time, and I think almost every Australian family will agree: things are much, much harder under this Labor government, and there is absolutely no sign of relief.

As this motion rightly points out, the Labor government have lost their way because, during their time in opposition, they were discussing ways in which they would make life easier for Australians, such as the elusive promise of a $275 reduction in energy prices. It's just interesting to note that now, in government, the only thing they want to talk about is the opposition and what the opposition did when they were in government. Perhaps there's a bit of irony: the only free rent available in Australia is for the space that the opposition takes up in the minds of government members and the Prime Minister.

Talking to this $275 reduction in energy prices, it's elusive because, according to members of government and despite energy prices going up by more than $1,000 under Labor, they still claim they haven't broken this promise to the Australian people. In fact, they claim that they've kept this promise and even exceeded it with their $300 per household rebate over four quarters. That's a special kind of spin. You don't need to be a mathematician to figure out 1,000 minus 300 is 700, meaning that, even on these gross numbers, Australians are, despite the rebate and despite the promises and posturing from the government, still at least $700 a year worse off under this government when it simply comes to their energy bills—just that small part of their expenditure.

Perhaps if this were the only broken promise and the only area of the household budget that had taken a hit under this government, then maybe it could be forgiven. However, energy prices are just one of the many areas breaking the budgets of so many Australian households. As a result of Labor's failure to get their homegrown and cultivated inflation under control, Australian mortgage holders have had to endure 12 interest rate rises, and there is no sign that the RBA will be bringing down rates any time soon. In fact, the RBA governor indicated that they did not even consider bringing rates down at their most recent meeting and that in fact it was a lineball call in terms of putting rates up again.

While those opposite might claim that this is a global issue, we all know that it's not. In fact, as we heard at the cost-of-living inquiry in Sydney, the economy is running hot. These are not my words. These are the words from the RBA. It is Labor governments, state and federal, that are pumping billions of dollars of public money into the economy, pushing up the cost of everything and pulling down our standard of living. Labor promised us, as recently as the last budget, that inflation would come down faster and sooner and with it, interest rates. This has not happened. Here we are, only three months on, and the RBA has a very different view. The Treasurer wants Australians to trust his economics, but how can they when pretty much every single promise that has been made has been broken? As the government drags out its response to inflation, it deepens the financial suffering of millions of Australians.

Whether mortgage holders or renters, each of these cohorts has to pay more for longer under this government—and a mortgage or rent is not something that people can cut back on. You can't reduce your spending on your mortgage. You can't ring up your bank and say: 'I'm really sorry. I'm having a really tough month, so I'm going to give you a little bit less this month.' It doesn't work like that. It's not discretionary. For so many people, they are one rate rise or one rent rise away from losing the roof over their head. That's the legacy of this government and this Treasurer—driving hardworking Australians into poverty.

This Prime Minister has delivered 'brokenomics' to the Australian people, and that's pretty sad. They're feeling it. Australians are feeling broke. They are feeling poorer because they are poorer. Real wages for working households are down by 9.4 per cent since the election. So Australians are working harder for longer for less. That's what this government has delivered them. This doesn't just have financial impacts. This has impacts on wellbeing. This impacts families. This impacts people's mental health. This impacts the relationships in our broader community.

I'd like to touch on the impact that this cacophony of economic mismanagement has also had on small businesses. This year, business closures have reached record highs. According to CreditorWatch data, 90 per cent of Australia will see an increase in business failures. There is virtually no part of our broad geography that won't be impacted by this, and one of the worst-hit areas is Western Sydney, in my home state of New South Wales. Many people from Western Sydney are migrants who came here with a dream, like my family—aspirational people who want to improve their own standard of living and to provide a better standard of living and a better life for their children. Yet they are now the ones being crushed the most by the Labor government's inability to get this homegrown inflation under control. This Australian dream is quickly turning into a nightmare, and we have a prime minister and government in absentia when it comes to dealing with inflation and cost of living.

Perhaps they are unable, due to a lack of capability or a lack of proper attention, to deal with the economic crisis facing the people of this nation. They have decided to hide from it, to pretend that it doesn't exist and to pretend that the people on this side of the chamber have concocted it. Their heads are in the sand, and they're leaving it up to the RBA to solve, whose only lever is to hike interest rates. I've spoken about this over and over again, and this is not the action of a mature and responsible government. It is not fair to the RBA. It is not fair to everyday Australians, and it is an absolute breach of trust in those that have been charged to lead. You don't delegate running the economy to the RBA with the single lever of increasing interest rates. It is not right to leave that heavy lifting to unelected economists in the central bank. They should not have to carry this burden, nor should Australians have to take a constant beating when the RBA has no option but to increase rates.

Let me make this clear: there is no more fat to cut from household budgets. People are stretched to their limits. There are no more items to put back on the shelves. Australians are going cold, literally, under this government. According to research from comparison site Finder, half a million Australians have chosen not to use heating this winter. That's extraordinary. Can they cut back on any more electricity if they're not using any heating? Australians are going cold because they're not using their heating. They're going hungry because they're putting less in their shopping trolley, and their homes are at risk. They have been failed by this government.

What do Australians get from this Labor government and this Treasurer? They get a narrative about a quarterly energy bill cut but no mention of the impacts of 12 interest rate rises. Economics Professor Richard Holden wrote in the AFR recently about how prices are 15 per cent higher today than they were when the Albanese government was elected. We also have record low consumer confidence. In his article, he summarised a sense of emotion felt across Australia and especially felt on this side of the chamber. He said:

People really hate inflation. More precisely, people really hate persistent inflation that leads to much higher price levels.

Australians do hate inflation because it robs them and their children. It makes them poorer. It makes their work worth less. It limits their choices and it limits their opportunities.

We only need to look through history to see inflation has taken powerhouse economies and crippled them. Some of these countries have never recovered. We on this side of the chamber know just how dangerous inflation is, and we know it must be tackled and that government spending must slow down. We know, if the economy doesn't cool down, we risk baking high inflation into it. The risk of continued and persistent inflation is a scary one. It means Australia could be on a path where the continued degradation of our standard of living becomes a built-in element of our economy.

Yet I ask again: Where is the government? Where is the Treasurer? Where is the urgency to get this under control? We've all been asking. It's time to act. The time to act has actually passed. We've been saying that for months. Where are you? What are you doing? Australians are looking to government for a response to inflation and the cost of living, and the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are hiding behind the RBA public servants in Martin Place.

A government in absentia is not a government at all. It's a sad analogy, but, rather than, 'Where's Wally?' we have an absent Albo and a great deal of 'Jim-flation'.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I often end up in this place, in this seat, while these debates are going on and I always resolve to myself: don't take the bait; just let it go; let other people make a contribution. As people may have noticed, I'm losing my voice this week. Probably I should just sit down but I cannot resist making a few gentle points in relation to the government's position on these questions.

Senator Kovacic just did a very good job of outlining the Peter Dutton and David Littleproud response to any challenging set of circumstances. If there is national interest involved, you can rely upon them to mount the most hollow, artisan, shallow response. Peter Dutton has transformed from being what the Liberal Party had hoped would be a credible and potential leader of an alternative government to just a negative press release machine. All he does is shout 'no' into the void. If there is a national interest question, you can always rely upon them, like they did this week on Future Made in Australia, to mount the most negative hyper partisan oppositional approach, not in the national interest.

Australians are doing it tough. What Peter Dutton, David Littleproud, Barnaby Joyce and all these characters do is say: 'If we could really mount the most negative proposition and hope for the worst. What we want is the worst thing to possibly happen. If Australians can lose, maybe we can see a narrow pathway to victory.' Maybe that is the political genius that sits behind this negative bottom-of-the-barrel, shallow hyper partisan set of propositions. Negativity defines the federal opposition these days. The Liberal and National parties are just roaming around the country shouting 'no' at every single constructive proposition.

The problem with that position is that Australians don't buy that argument, because Australians every day, in their families, are getting on with it. More Australians are participating in work. In this quarter, while the unemployment rate notched up by a decimal point, more Australians are in work in communities—Australians working together. You have Barnaby Joyce down here talking about bullets and ballots to an ever-diminishing groups of maddies holding demonstrations against wind turbines or whatever other piece of modern technology he wants to campaign against. He will campaign against phones soon. He is out there talking about bullets and ballots and all the sort of cooker-weirdo stuff that he goes on with.

But Australian communities want to see industrial development. They want to see investment. They want to see good jobs. They want to see the Australian government fighting for them and fighting for their communities. Communities are working together on these questions. Workers and businesses, trade unions and our research sector are working to build a stronger, better, more resilient and productive economy.

The country has a government that, rather than complaining about the state of things, is acting on the state of things. This government introduced tax cuts for every single Australian taxpayer—every single one. Those tax cuts deliver much bigger cuts for the majority of Australian taxpayers, particularly those at the middle and bottom end of the tax scales. For regional Australia, it means 90 per cent of Australian workers get a better deal from the Albanese government tax cuts than from the tax cuts Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce and David Littleproud supported.

On energy bill relief, let's not forget, just before the election, Mr Taylor, the character in the lower house who wants to be the Treasurer, concealed from the Australian people upcoming energy price rises. It was an act of total deceit, total bad faith, by a guy who really wants to be the Leader of the Liberal Party. Ever since then, there hasn't been an energy bill price rise that hasn't been celebrated by the Liberal and National parties. They love energy bill price rises because they're an opportunity for them to campaign in here. What has the government done? Well, last budget year we provided energy caps—caps on the price of coal and caps on the price of gas. We used a sophisticated mechanism to deliver that, sometimes through the states and territories. This time round we've provided $300 in energy bill relief.

On childcare costs, childcare workers got a 50 per cent wage increase, costs for parents have gone down by 11 per cent, and there's a cap on future price rises of just over four per cent. Rather than complaining about the cost of child care and positioning around the cost of child care, the government has simply done something about the cost of child care. On cheaper medicine—again, there's been a lot of complaining on the other side about the government's plans to reduce the cost of medicines for ordinary people, but we introduced cheaper medicine provisions.

Wages have gone up for minimum wage earners and for earners across the system. There's a lot of funny behaviour about wage increases in the Liberal and National parties. They just can't help themselves. They pull out the graph and have a look at how wage increases are going up and whether inflation is going up. Every time the inflation line nudges above the wages line, it's another victory. They get to say, 'That's not a real wage increase.' But the point is: wages are going up. There's an alternative model. Just imagine if wages had continued on the Cormann-Morrison-Turnbull-Abbott trajectory, bumping along the bottom. Imagine, if that had continued to occur, how far behind ordinary Australian workers would be today. The show over there complaining about real wage growth is like Idi Amin complaining about human rights abuses. It is really not credible.

On Medicare, there are Medicare urgent care clinics, dozens of the things, all around the country. On education costs, HECS bills have been reduced for ordinary students.

There are a couple of things that unite all of these measures. Firstly, they are good and they help ordinary families with the cost of living, but, secondly, they have all been opposed—and bitterly—by the Liberal and National parties. Those opposite voted against all of these propositions. They care so much about rises in the cost of living that they are prepared to do every single thing they can to help ordinary Australians with them—except voting for them, except actually doing anything about it. That is the problem with the Liberal and National party position. It so transparently hyperpartisan, so transparently not in the interests of ordinary Australians, so transparently just for their own interests and their own party room dynamics. It plays well in the party room to be oppositional and negative. It doesn't play well to actually propose a constructive solution. That's why I think that ordinary Australians, working hard to get through what is a tough period, can see through the negativity of the coalition. As Senator Gallagher said today, we started government with an inflation rate with a '6' in front of it; it now has a '3' in front of it. There is more work to do.

The other interesting thing about the coalition's position on this—and Senator Kovacic didn't really take us to this—is their complaints about government spending, their negativity about the government's role in the economy. This government delivered two back-to-back surpluses. We delivered those back-to-back surpluses because we have been a disciplined government that is focused on real cuts to spending where it is not in the national interest to continue spending and real cuts to programs where they haven't been in the national interest. In fact, we delivered two back-to-back surpluses, a surplus that the other side has never in living memory—16 or 17 years ago was the last time the government delivered a surplus. We have delivered it.

But the implication that the Dutton-Littleproud show cannot avoid is that, if you really believe that what the government should do is cut spending, then what you have to do is accept that—I know this is a difficult proposition for some on the other side to believe—if you advocate cutting spending you have to find some spending cuts. That's the way it works. If you want to reduce spending, you have to identify spending reductions. We haven't heard very much about that. The bulk of increases in the government's share of the economy has of course been about indexation for various payments. The largest of those is the age pension. Do Peter Dutton and David Littleproud want to cut the age pension? Do they want to cut child care, Medicare, the ABC, regional road funding, defence spending? Which of these programs do Mr Dutton, Mr Littleproud and Mr Taylor—the boys club that runs the show over there—have as their target for spending cuts? Whenever you put this position, they set their hair on fire and say, 'That's a terrible thing to say; we would never do such a thing,' except they always do it. It's their track record. The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Their track record of promising not to cut spending and then immediately doing it on upon being elected is a very, very strong track record indeed.

What we should have been doing here this afternoon, instead of this juvenile, hyperpartisan motion about a misunderstanding of how the economy really works, is passing the government's legislation in relation to tidying up the construction and general branch of the CFMEU. That's what we should have been doing. We should have done it this week. We should have done it today. A deferral, not dealing with that legislation this afternoon—I know exactly who will be celebrating that outcome. There are three groups. Lawyers will spend a lot of taxpayers' money and a lot of CFMEU construction and general members' money trying to frustrate administration in the courts. It's good for the lawyers. It's good for those elements of the Liberal and National parties who have got control over the show over there, who love the negativity and who love the anti-union posturing. And it's good for Mr Setka and his friends. That's the truth.

What the construction industry is crying out for is a parliament that doesn't see its role as a sort of debating society but sees its role as taking action in the national interest. The construction industry needs that reform. It is the strongest possible reform that any government could mount. Instead, what we can look forward to is some of the more self-referential garbage that we saw in the debate earlier today, defending their legacy of failure for reform in this area, rooted in their own incapacity to see the public interest instead of the partisan interest. We will have to come back to this issue next week. But it is a real sign of the diminishing of the political capacity and the capacity of the opposition to see the national interest. (Time expired)

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion moved by Senator Kovacic be agreed to. A division having been called, I remind honourable senators that, when a division is called on Thursdays after 4.30 pm, the matter before the Senate must be adjourned until the next day of sitting, at a time to be fixed by the Senate. The debate is adjourned accordingly.