It may well be that Australians find themselves, in the coming months or a little longer, facing another election. And there is no doubt, as this motion and the speakers from both sides have pointed out, that cost of living will be the issue. I would put to the Australian people that there is a significant question they need to be asking themselves at this coming election: are you better off today than you were when Labor came to government? Across the board, no matter where we look, the resounding answer is no. New homes are 19.7 per cent more expensive than they were when Labor came to government; bread, 19.5 per cent; and milk, 18.8 per cent. Two areas that we talk a lot about in this place are gas and electricity. The price of gas has gone up by 21.3 per cent and electricity by 20.2 per cent. We have seen a 30 per cent increase in insurance premiums.
All these costs are bearing down on Australian households. And it’s across the board. We’re feeling it right across the economy. I would say to the Australian people—as they go into those booths, whenever that day comes, and they ask themselves that question, am I better off?—that they need to know that where we are today is no accident. We are here, worse off, because of a series of deliberate decisions made by this Labor government. We can pin it back, somewhat humorously, but it is painful humour, to the 6,000-word essay the Treasurer wrote about ‘remaking capitalism’, about how he was going to throw away the knowledge, the ideas, the experience of the past; the Treasurer alone knew better. He was going to show us how to do things. Well, here we are. What a failure.
We could speak to Labor’s immigration policy, a policy deliberately designed to keep us out of recession. We are in a per capita recession. Our immigration policy is designed purely to keep us out of that. And it’s an absolute shame, because of course the impact is on young homeowners, trying to get a house. We could talk about Labor’s price caps policy in the gas industry, which has done what every price cap policy has done for more than 2,000 years, and that is to reduce supply and drive up prices. That’s a deliberate decision. We could talk about their IR legislation, which is driving down productivity. The Minerals Council of Australia’s explicit accounts of how that will happen in evidence presented to the Economics Committee should be reading for everyone; it is reading for the ages.
We’ve got $315 billion of additional spending that the RBA now acknowledges is driving up inflation. And we have a government that boasts of two surpluses yet in its own budget papers confirmed that the cost of that last surplus is 10 years of deficits. This is a deliberate design—short-term-ism making things worse in the long term. We are not here by accident. We’re not worse off by accident. This is where Labor wanted to take us.
Worst of all was the great promise Labor made to get real wages moving again. Wages did move again—they went backwards by nine per cent under Labor, who turned its back on the labourers who used to build the Labor Party, walked away from those at the lower income levels. I spent last Friday night at Tony’s Community Kitchen watching people come in to receive donated food. What was shocking was the number of working people, the number of those whose dollar would have gone far enough to be able to look after their own not that long ago. To the Australian people—as you look across the economy and as you look across the pain you’re feeling—ask yourselves, ‘Are we better off than we were before Labor came to government?’ What you need to know is that there is another way. They’re easy decisions. There’s $315 billion of cash that’s going out the door. These are decisions the government has made with a short-term approach. There is a moral argument for making tough decisions when it comes to the economy, because inflation bears down unevenly on our economy. It’s renting pensioners and young Australians who are getting hurt the most by Labor’s absence of moral courage when it comes to dealing with these issues. They are hurting Australians by design. It’s an absolute disgrace, and shame on this government.
