Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Dean Smith has submitted a proposal under standing order 75:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

"The latest Living Cost Index, which shows cost of living is up 19.4% since Labor came to power, confirms what Australians see every day, hardworking families and businesses are struggling under an Albanese Labor Government that has pursued the wrong priorities and made the wrong decisions, demonstrating that Australians can't afford three more years of Labor"

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.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The latest Living Cost Index, which shows cost of living is up 19.4% since Labor came to power, confirms what Australians see every day, hardworking families and businesses are struggling under an Albanese Labor Government that has pursued the wrong priorities and made the wrong decisions, demonstrating that Australians can't afford three more years of Labor.

Every election is important, and many Australians will know through harsh experience over the last 2½ years that this election is especially important. But, at the outset, I just want to demonstrate that, in 2025, whether it be on 29 March, 12 April or 17 May, the decisions that Australians make at this election are perhaps the most critical that they have had to make in the last three decades.

In 1998, when John Howard was the Prime Minister, Australians were faced with a difficult choice. Having enjoyed the benefits of economic reform and economic prosperity, they were asked to go one step further and to embrace the goods and services tax reform proposed by John Howard and Peter Costello. That was a tough decision. It was a tough election campaign, but the country is better for the decision to re-elect John Howard; re-elect the Treasurer, Peter Costello; and engage in tax reform of the most significant kind this country has ever seen. Indeed, this year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the goods and services tax in our country.

Then again, in 2001, under the stewardship of John Howard as Prime Minister, the country was faced with another important election decision, and that was the primacy of our national security challenges, demonstrated by the Tampa incident and by other challenging issues that were happening throughout the world. Then of course in 2019, miraculously for those of us on this side—pleasantly miraculously—Prime Minister Scott Morrison was re-elected when Australians treated with great caution and, indeed, trepidation the ideas of the then opposition leader Bill Shorten to raise taxes for ordinary Australian families.

Again, they're faced with a difficult but critical choice in terms of embracing a better future. Everyone in this country, even Senator Sheldon, even Senator Chisholm, even Senator Grogan and even Senator Ghosh, would be surprised at how disastrous this government has been after just 2½ years. The government like to talk about everything they have done, but the only measure is the effect of what they have done. The effect of what they have done has been to keep inflation high and to put Australian families under stress through 12 interest rate rises. When families gather around their barbecues and their kitchen tables and think about their future, the parents and grandparents of Australians in 2025 cannot say that the future of their children and their grandchildren is guaranteed for the next three, six or nine years. We know from our own experience, from the International Monetary Fund, from the OECD, from the Minerals Council of Australia and from the chambers of commerce around our country that living standards have collapsed and people cannot be guaranteed of a prosperous future beyond their immediate sights.

Labor's legacy has been to make the country poorer and to make the country less safe. That's the hard choice that Australians are going to face when they go to the ballot box on 12 April, 17 May or 29 March. I say that because apparently I hear that the Prime Minister doesn't like being told when the election will be, so I thought we might just try and push him to a date. Australians are ready to make a decision. They're ready to make a decision about their financial future.

This Labor government promised so much. In Perth, the capital city of my home state of Western Australia, in May 2022 Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that things would be better under Labor. I dare him to come back to Perth in 2025 and stand in front of the same audience in the electorate of Swan and tell people that things have been better under Labor and will continue to be better. We know that that is just not true and not the record of this government. Core inflation remains above the RBA band, at 3.2 per cent. Underlying inflation has continued to be outside the band for 12 quarters. Prices are not going down. Prices continue to go up. It is time for a change.

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

Well, here we go. The cost of living is, as all of us know, a challenge for many people and a challenge right across our community. But it's a challenge that, in actual fact, you have to put policies in place for, and that's exactly what Labor's done not just to resolve it but also to help people, support people and support the community to get a better outcome than what's happening and what was happening when we took over.

When we came into government, what we were left by the previous government was a whole raft of problems. For every change we put forward to this Senate and to this parliament—every progressive, smart idea and every piece of relief that went to the Australian public—they voted against it. We know why they voted against it and didn't want to give relief to hardworking Australians. They voted against it because they put us in the crisis in the first place. These are the sorts of people who really don't care about the consequences of their policies. If they did care, they'd actually turn around and start saying, 'We were brave enough to say what we stood for.' We know one thing they stand for: $350 billion worth of services being taken off hardworking Australians.

We saw what happened with Medicare when they first got into office in the last round: 'There is nothing to see here.' Nothing was going to happen. Peter Dutton took $50 billion out of Medicare, out of the health system, and tried to do co-payments when they said they'd do nothing. Heaven forbid—this time they said they're actually going to do something, but they won't tell you what that is. You can only go off the history of what they've done, but what they've said is they're going to hit you with a whacking $350 billion worth of services that will be taken out.

That's before you get to the $600 billion nuclear fantasy. Why are they doing it? The factional obligations in their political party, all the twisting and turning, all the differing views and the 22 energy policies meant that they decided to put in an idea about nuclear: 'That way we can all say we support something—not support the country and not have an initiative that makes things better but make sure that the factional deal can be done.' They want to bankrupt this country with the strategy that they've adopted, with a $600 billion bill, and take $350 billion out of services.

Clearly what they also did were the things that they voted against and the policies that they've put forward. There would be over $7,500 of extra cost that would be put on every working Australian if you were to go with the policies that they've turned around and put forward whilst being in the Senate during this term of this government, this Albanese government. There are also other policies and proposals they have put forward, like the extra $1,200 in electricity costs that will come out of energy. Can you imagine spending $600 billion and in 2050 only 3.7 per cent of the energy mix being nuclear? It costs more. It's a deal to make sure that the factions in their party can all get on. It's the 22 policies that they couldn't agree on. They finally agreed on bankrupting the country with a stupid policy that will cost every Australian more.

Then you start looking at the policies that they've adopted right across the board. When we came in, inflation was higher and, of course, was rising, real wages were falling, living standards were declining and people were going backwards. That's what they left. Now we're seeing that inflation is at almost a third of what it was when the election was called all that time ago—only a couple of years ago.

Real wages are growing again. Living standards are rising again. We recorded the lowest average unemployment rate for any government in 50 years, and we've overseen the creation of more than 1.1 million jobs. But the job still has to be done. They're offering for you all to be worse off. They're offering to take $350 billion out of the pockets of hardworking Australians for services that they need to get on. They're the ones that broke the middle class. They're the ones under whom the middle class shrunk. We're the ones that are actually turning around and rebuilding the middle class.

But there's more work to be done. They have one strategy, and the strategy they've always put in place is one that makes sure that we're meaner, we're crueller and we're less reflective about what this community needs to make sure that we get on and help those that want to turn around and take an opportunity to move up in the world and not be held back. They don't care about things like fee-free TAFE that give people the opportunity to be better. They're opposed to it. That's where the $350 billion is going to come from. Things will be worse off under a Dutton government, which will crush the Australian public.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do you know who isn't doing it tough right now? Billionaires. While those on low incomes and government support do it ever tougher, billionaires are making bank. Their incomes are increasing at a staggering rate. According to Oxfam, last year Australian billionaire wealth surged by $28 billion. That's $3.2 million per hour. That's 47 people who each made $67,000 per hour every hour last year. The cost-of-living crisis that this lot want to talk about is really an inequality crisis where the richest people hoard money and resources and have the ear of government. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poorer. The major parties talk big about ordinary people, but their solutions are poor. They simply won't take on their rich donors.

The solution is pretty simple. It's not more finger-pointing between Labor and the coalition; it's to tax billionaires to fund a decent life for everyone else. When you look at the cost of living, it's housing that's hitting people the hardest. For anyone in New South Wales, especially those in my home city of Sydney, the scale of the housing crisis cannot be addressed by just trimming the edges. A survey by Everybody's Home shows four out of five renters are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. That is not a surprise. It's been a year-on-year increase in rent of nine per cent in Sydney—so much so that the median house price in Sydney will set you back $1.6 million. The median wage, meanwhile, is about 67 grand a year. You have Sydney housing costing more than 24 times someone's average salary.

Why is it all happening? It is because the government has given up on providing public housing and defending renters. Instead, they've thrown in their lot with the coalition on negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts. These tax handouts collectively push up prices of housing to astronomically high levels and cut out renters. It needs to change.

If we wanted to do one thing we could right now to strike a blow in this place, it would be dealing with cannabis. Bear with me. The Greens have a proposal for legalising cannabis: a system where you could grow some at home—very cost effective, very thrifty—or you could also buy cannabis from a well-regulated legal market. The best cost estimates we have from the PBO say that, even with a cannabis sales tax and GST, the recreational price of cannabis declines once you have a legal market and generates billions of dollars of public revenue. In fact, the recreational price halves in a decade, with almost no increase in overall cannabis use. It's public health control and would lead to less spending on police, courts and jails. It's a cost-of-living measure we should all get behind. Of course it won't fix the housing crisis. It won't jail supermarket bosses for price gouging or make Medicare free. But still—more money, more jobs, safer product and all for 50 per cent off? Sounds like a win all round.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian people are asking themselves, 'Why has my life become so much harder under this government?' It's a fair question to ask. The answer is that the government has spent three years doing two things: designing policies and laws which support the benefactors, the mates, the chums of the government—their fellow travellers—and spending the last part of this term working out how they can funnel cash to their favourite friends through an elaborate set of laws principally known as the Future Made in Australia but not exclusive to that point.

Now, the first part of this term saw, in particular, Minister Jones working out how he could work with the industrial relations minister to design policies and schemes that would support the union movement but also the super funds. And so we have seen pattern bargaining. We have seen same job same pay. We have seen the abolition, the death of casual working in this country. This is all designed to institute a scheme where the unions can clip a ticket. They can clip a ticket through more subscriptions to pay the union bosses, because they hate small business. They always have. Hating small business is in their DNA. And so they've spent the bulk of the time working out how they can lock in laws which kill small business and pay off the people that run their internal elections, that turn up on polling day and that fund their campaigns. That has been the focus of this government. As I say, pattern bargaining, the end of small business, same job same pay—that's in the industrial relations space.

Then you have the superannuation space. There is more and more money going to the super funds and a deathly silence about scandals. We see today that the Treasurer, Dr Chalmers, has decided that he would actually agree with the Clerk of the Senate's advice that he must comply with the Senate's orders to provide documents pertaining to the Cbus super fund. Dr Chalmers has been a bit reticent here to engage with the Senate's orders. Maybe because his mentor and great friend, Mr Wayne Swan, is a chair of that fund. Maybe it is because Mr Swan is also the president of the Labor Party. These are questions for the ages, which we won't have answers for right now. But I think it's pretty clear that this is more evidence of the government being the government for vested interests. If this were a scandal at a bank or a supermarket—if the bank hadn't paid its bills or the supermarket were in bed with a corrupt organisation—the government would be all over it like a rash. But they are not. Even though Cbus has not paid its insurance claims and even though Cbus has paid millions of dollars to the CFMEU, you hear crickets—not even a bogong moth—nothing. But if it were a bank or a supermarket, it'd be all you'd hear about.

So the protection racket is not just about favourable policy for their mates; it's also about a code of silence for those that break our laws. When the Nine newspapers broke the story about the CFMEU's latest antics, it was like shock, horror on the government benches. Who knew? Who knew these guys were bad? I think the Australian people are starting to see it for what it is. The government has had no time to solve the problems of today on inflation and housing because it spends all its time thinking about its mates, its best friends. That is what the Future Made in Australia plan is all about. It's another program of largesse, just like the Housing Australia Future Fund and the Reconstruction Fund. All these funds support the overall direction of this government, which is a government for vested interests. They have no time to solve the great challenges of today, which is why small business is dying. It's why inflation is out of control and why housing is unbearable in this country.

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

One Nation supports this matter of urgency. During 2024 alone the living cost index for wage and salary earners rose four per cent, down from a high of six per cent earlier in the year. The reduction has been caused, in large part, through electricity subsidies. The government is paying your bill for you! The underlying inflation rate is still there, ready to reappear after the next election, when the government stops paying those subsidies.

Rising electricity prices for business are not being subsidised, increasing prices in supermarkets, retail, wholesale and manufacturing. The public see the price rises and don't realise they are, in large part, the result of net zero measures, which One Nation will bring to an end, reducing power bills by 20 per cent immediately, and by much more over forward estimates.

Alcohol and tobacco costs rose due to the five per cent excise indexation and a cash grab the government calls AWOTE, where the more workers earn, the more the government increases the excise. One Nation will freeze all excise increases for three years. Watch for further announcements on this subject.

Insurance and financial services costs rose 13 per cent due to higher premiums for house, home contents and motor vehicle insurance. Insurance companies are becoming increasingly concentrated. Queensland's Suncorp owns AAMI, GIO, Bingle and Shannons among others. Over the last five years Suncorp's cash earnings rose from $59 to $108, and their share price rose from $9 to $17. One Nation will fund the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, to ensure insurance companies are not ripping off consumers, including using fraudulent flood and bushfire maps to hike premiums. One Nation will remove the GST on insurance premiums.

Finally, the fall in inflation coming from a small reduction in the petrol price is significant. It proves One Nation's policy to cut fuel excise by 26c per litre, and our other measures, will reduce inflation to make room for an interest rate cut. One Nation means more money in your pocket.

Varun Ghosh (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are facing significant cost-of-living pressures, but there's an incorrect premise in this urgency motion, which is that this is as a result of the policies or the actions of the Albanese government. That's a premise that's simply not supported by the actual numbers on inflation and real wages.

Cost of living in this country is a function of what things cost for people day to day, how much they earn by way of their wages or income and the support that government provides in addition. In relation to those three things, what the numbers actually bear out, once you look past all the rhetoric, is that things are heading in the right direction in terms of inflation. Things are heading in the right direction in terms of the real wages of people in this country. While we are in this cost-of-living crisis, the Labor government is actually supporting people to try and help them get through it. The coalition narrative amounts to, 'We made a huge mess on those three metrics, but you guys haven't cleaned it up fast enough, so you should give us back the keys,' and I think that that's just flawed at its heart.

But let's talk about inflation. I spoke last week about the profligate spending of the Morrison government, but the numbers don't bear out their argument today. I'm going to use two sets of numbers to make that point. The first is headline inflation, not seasonally adjusted, and the second is trimmed mean inflation, and that is going to be seasonally adjusted. That's the way the RBA reports those numbers.

If we go back to March 2022, those numbers were at 5.1 per cent headline and then 3.8 per cent trimmed mean, and then they start to ratchet up. They ratchet up through June 2022 to 6.1 per cent headline and 4.9 per cent trimmed mean, and then they ratchet up again in September to 7.3 per cent and six per cent and then again in December to 7.8 per cent and 6.8 per cent. That's the lag, the inflationary hangover, of Morrison government policies. And then you start to see that inflation moderate, you start to see some of the economic signals slow a little and you see some of the anti-inflationary policies of the Albanese government start to work. That number comes down and down and down until we have, most recently, in December 2024, a number of 2.4 per cent of headline inflation, not seasonally adjusted. That's back in the Reserve Bank band. That's inflation within target—from 7.8 per cent to 2.4 per cent. But, if you want to exclude the most volatile parts of the CPI—that is, trimmed mean inflation—it's down to 3.2 per cent, so we're slightly out of band. But, if you talk about the trajectory, it's been coming down and down. While the government has got inflation under control, we would accept that prices remain really high for people, and that's partly the reason we've been providing all this cost-of-living relief.

The other thing I want to talk about is real wages, because that's the other piece of the puzzle. If your real wages are going up, you've got more money to spend, and real wages have gone up in the last four quarters. But where it really hurts—this is where the Morrison government and their policies of trying to suppress wage growth really hurt ordinary Australians—is where you've got inflation high on one hand and real wages going down on the other. If you look at those numbers across that timeframe—I'll show you two or three data points—headline inflation in June 2022 was 6.1 per cent, and real wages fell 3.4 per cent. When costs are going up and wages are going down, that hurts people. When we got to the Morrison hangover's peak in December 2022, it was 7.8 per cent headline inflation, and real wages fell 4.4 per cent. That's the cost-of-living pinch that people feel when the money coming in is going down and the money going out is going up, and we've reversed that. Real wages are now growing again. We've had four quarters of small but promising real wages growth.

What are we doing about the pain for ordinary Australians? There are lots of measures that we've talked about in this chamber for the last year, but I'll focus on two. The first is tax cuts for every Australian—that is, every Australian taxpayer got a tax cut on 1 July 2024. And that was most helpful to the people earning $45,000 or less, who weren't going to get anything before. The second is energy bill relief, which you've heard a lot about. Inflation is trending down. Real wages are growing again, and we are trying to assist Australians with their cost-of-living pressures.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ghosh talks about the so-called coalition narrative. I'll tell you what the narrative is: Labor promised the cost of living would be lower if they were elected. That's the narrative. And the narrative from there is Labor didn't do what they promised they would do. They promised a lower cost of living. They haven't delivered that. In fact, the numbers came through last week that show that. If Senator Ghosh wants to use point-in-time metrics that's fine but, last week, the figures came in and they demonstrate that the cost-of-living index shows that, for Australian's hardworking families, it's up 19.4 per cent since they came to power.

Labor promised a lower cost of living; they haven't delivered that. They haven't done what they promised they'd do. It's as if they had no idea of what was going on in the economy before the election. Suddenly, after the election, everything has changed and they can't keep their promises. Of course they promised to lower power prices by $275. Now we never hear the words $275 uttered and power prices are up by more than $1,000, not down by $275—that will never happen—and that's after the cost-of-living relief.

They promised higher real wages, yet real wages have gone backwards under Labor. Despite what Senator Ghosh said a moment ago, real wages rose under the term of the coalition. No wonder Australians are angry. They were promised all of these things by Anthony Albanese before the election. Ninety-seven times, he promised a $275 reduction in power prices, and that will never happen. No chance!

He promised lower housing costs. Someone in my community is paying something like $14,500 more on their mortgage than they were before the election. How does that relate to lower housing costs? Rents are up by 17 per cent. How does this relate to the Prime Minister's promises of a lower cost of living if he was elected? Why is it, I'm wondering, that nobody believes the Prime Minister when he makes these commitments and promises now? It's because he didn't keep any of his promises from before the election.

Food is up by 12 per cent. Here's the real absurdity with respect to what is going on with Labor's narrative on food: they're saying that they're going to get a better deal for farmers—to a farmer that means they'll get paid more—but, of course, they're promising lower prices at the supermarket. Tell me how that works.

This is the stuff that we're being fed by this government. They have proven, just as they've done so many times before, that they can't manage the economy. The circumstances in the economy were well and truly transparent, public and open, before the election. They knew what they were dealing with. It's all very well for them to now blame Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison or somebody else and to deflect the blame. It is one thing they're really good at: 'It's somebody else's fault, not ours. We didn't know'. But they made these promises. These are Labor's words coming back to haunt them. They made these promises: a lower cost of living, lower power prices and higher real wages. They made these promises and they continue to break them. Education costs are up 10-plus per cent.

It's all very well for the Prime Minister and the Treasurer to think that they know more than the Reserve Bank, as they did before the last budget saying, 'We know something that will bring inflation down.' They offer subsidies for energy to provide a faux inflation rate. They're just not honest with the Australian people, and the Australian people will judge them for that. (Time expired)

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion as moved by Senator Dean Smith be agreed to.