House debates

Monday, 5 September 2022

Private Members' Business

Cost of Living

10:44 am

Photo of James StevensJames Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the mover of the motion, the member for Hughes, on bringing this important subject into this chamber. I think most Australians, if stopped in the street, would say that cost-of-living pressures were the most significant thing that they were concerned about. It's something that's causing a great deal of apprehension amongst the families of Australia, who are confronting real, significant pressures from multiple fronts when it comes to the cost of living.

We have the Reserve Bank meeting tomorrow, and, regrettably, there is a high likelihood that interest rates will be increasing again. One of the largest burdens on the household budget is meeting the cost of your mortgage, for those that have a mortgage. Petrol prices have been sustained at a high level for a significant period of time, and very shortly the temporary reduction in the fuel excise is going to be removed. With other indexation, a 25c-a-litre increase in the cost of unleaded fuel is going to put an enormous amount of additional pressure onto families in this country, on top of already paying higher petrol prices. Electricity prices are also going up at a remarkably high rate, with increases of more than 10 per cent in some jurisdictions within the National Electricity Market having come into effect from 1 July. And, of course, real wages are decreasing—wages in this country are growing at a lower rate than inflation.

What is absolutely appalling is that anyone would commit a great fraud on the people of this country by going to an election in May, saying they're going to reduce cost of living pressures, they're going to reduce electricity prices and they're going to increase real wages, and subsequently failing to keep those promises. That is an absolute disgrace—a break of a covenant that was put in place through a campaign of lies and misinformation that the Labor Party ran at the recent election.

Let's look at electricity. We never hear this $275 figure anymore. It has not been uttered out of the lips of anyone, particularly the Prime Minister and the relevant ministers, since the election. But in the election campaign they said, 'We're going to implement an electricity and energy policy which will reduce electricity prices for the average household consumer by $275.' That was a very simple commitment that was given. They didn't have to give that commitment; they chose to. If it turns out to be a lie, then that will be an absolute disgrace, and a significant electoral cost will be inflicted on them for lying to people about that. Meeting electricity costs is one of the most significant challenges that households have.

The Labor Party said, 'We modelled these electricity price reductions, and that's how we know we can achieve them,' so, despite any spurious argument about existing policies of previous governments going back over the last 10 years, those policies would have been taken into account in the modelling that you did. If it were reputable modelling, if it were robust, there would be no way that you could say with a straight face that anything of significance had changed since you made that commitment. The only thing we can deduce, therefore, is that you knew you weren't going to meet it but you thought, 'We'll lie to people to get their vote, and we'll deal with the consequences of that after we've won an election and we're in government.' Well, the chickens are coming home to roost right now.

You're far from achieving that $275, so come clean and own up to it. Say: 'Yes, look, for all these reasons, we're no longer going to achieve the $275. It was someone else's fault, but, yes, when we said that it was a lie.' And now electricity prices are not going down; they're going up. They're going up by more than 10 per cent. The Labor Party went to an election and misled the people of this country on that.

They misled them on real wages, as well. They said, 'We're going to get real wages growing,' and we got lectures when they were in opposition about how real wages worked. When you look at the—

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