Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition are doing a range of things to reduce cost-of-living pressures for Australians. Let's start, for example, with our record on bulk-billing—85.9 per cent of doctors' visits are now bulk-billed. That is something that helps everyday Australians with their cost of living. We have record federal hospital funding. We have tax cuts for businesses, which helps businesses earn and generate income, reinvest, purchase goods from other businesses and, most importantly, employ Australians. We have tax cuts for 500,000 Australians who are on middle incomes.

I can tell you what we're not doing. We are not abolishing the private health insurance rebate, which assists something like 13 million Australians who have private health insurance cover. At the Press Club in the past week, the Leader of the Opposition refused to rule out abolishing the private health insurance rebate, which, as I said, does assist some 13 million or so Australians to cover themselves and be responsible for themselves and their health insurance.

We also have record jobs growth. After four years of coalition government, we have over 918,000 more jobs for Australians. In 2017 alone employment increased by 403,000 jobs, and around 75 per cent of these jobs were full-time jobs. These are the sorts of things that we're doing to help with cost-of-living pressures, because when you have a job you can afford to do a range of things. You can afford to make the choices that you want to make for your life that are good for you, good for your family and good for your community.

Coming from South Australia, of course, I have to talk about one of the biggest cost-of-living pressures in my home state, which is the cost of power. We know the result of Premier Jay Weatherill's 'big international experiment'. I want to read the Premier's statement about his power policy in South Australia, because it does bear repeating. We need to remind everybody what the Premier has done to my home state of South Australia. He said:

We are running a big international experiment right now. We have got a long, skinny transmission system and we will soon have 50 per cent renewable energy, including a lot of wind and some solar. We want to get as close as possible to 100 per cent renewable power. We know there are challenges. But with big risks go big opportunities.

I can't see many opportunities that have come for the people of South Australia, apart from paying some of the world's highest electricity bills, and that is not an opportunity that I want for my residents in my seat of Boothby, nor anyone in my home state of South Australia.

We have families, individuals, pensioners and elderly people who are suffering. We have people who won't turn the air-conditioner on because they do not know if they will be able to meet the cost of their power. This is a result of the failed energy policies of not just the state Labor government but also those opposite. During six years of federal Labor, we saw electricity prices double under the failed Rudd-Gillard-Rudd regimes. Both federal and state Labor policies have continued to increase pressure on prices through shortages in gas supplies, for example, unrealistic renewable energy targets, and open hostility to reliable baseload power through gas and coal. In South Australia, after 16 years of the Labor government, we've seen the closure of the Playford station and the Northern Power Station, the disastrous 50 per cent Renewable Energy Target, which I have already touched on, the terribly unreliable power in the state and the highest prices in the nation and in the world.

What is the coalition government doing? We are doing everything we can from the federal level—even though it's not really our responsibility; this is a state government responsibility—to bring down this cost pressure on South Australians and all Australians. We don't want to see these mistakes repeated in other states. Through the National Energy Guarantee, we are looking at gas. We are making sure that there is enough gas available for Australians through the Domestic Gas Security Mechanism. We are working on Snowy Hydro 2.0, which will provide a fabulous new source of renewable energy that is completely and utterly reliable, as the Snowy has been for a couple of generations now. We're looking at what the retailers can do to reduce retail prices and also a range of other mechanisms to help everyday Australians with their cost-of-living pressures.

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