Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the shadow Treasurer for this matter of public importance because many Australians are struggling with cost-of-living pressures. Inflation takes the most from the people who have the least to give. It hurts people who can't make their budget stretch any further. It hurts first home buyers and people already struggling with high rent. It hurts people already experiencing low wages growth over the last 10 years. I see that in my electorate. I see that at the Parramatta Mission, where the number of people uptaking the food parcels has increased by 187 per cent, where the meals program is up 140 per cent over the last year and where Centrelink referrals have more than tripled. That is the front line of the inflation challenge in Australia.

I'll tell you one person who isn't on the front line of the inflation challenge in Australia, and that's the mover of this motion, the shadow Treasurer. Everybody knows, by this point, that, in the last session of parliament, the shadow Treasurer messed up. He didn't know the price of Vegemite. That's okay. Everybody saw him confuse the annual rate with the monthly rate, which is a pretty big gaffe. What struck me was not that he made that mistake but why he made that mistake. If you were listening carefully, you would have heard the shadow Treasurer say where he got his information on the price of Vegemite. He didn't get it from talking to real people. He didn't get it from Coles. He didn't get it from Woolies. He didn't get it from food banks. He didn't get it from Aldi, although that is a sensible choice. He got it from a UBS Investment Bank report. When it comes to understanding the real pressure on real people, he turns to the merchant banking community—his eyes and ears on the realities of Australian families.

Now, I'm not saying he's out of touch, but he does find out the price of Weet-Bix from Westpac; he does check on the price of golden syrup from Goldman Sachs. Some people have their sources, like Deep Throat. He has Deutsche Bank. But it says something about the state of the Liberal Party—that they pretend to care about inflation, that they pretend to care about the cost of living, but that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Could you be any more out of touch than coming into the people's House and talking about the price of groceries as you read from an investment banking report?

The truth is that the opposition isn't interested in fixing this problem; they're fixated on blaming the government for it. The words of this MPI make that clear: 'The inflation crisis which this government has caused'. Let's look at that causation. This CPI rising cycle began in 2020, when the level of the CPI was 114.4. From that point, of 114.4, that turning point in the CPI back in 2020, the CPI rose 12 points to 126.1 in the quarter of the federal election in 2022. It went up 12 points. From that point, it's risen six points to 132.6 today.

So, as of this point in the current inflationary cycle, 12 points happened under the Liberals and six have happened while Labor has been in government. Of the 18-point increase in the CPI level, there were 12 under those opposite and just six under us. And you see the math. Why did it go up so much under the Liberals? It went up so much under the Liberals because they delivered the most expansionary budgets in Australia's peacetime history, because of the billions of dollars wasted on JobKeeper, the worst targeted program in Australia's history, subsidising businesses and employees that did not have significant revenue hits.

Do you remember that JobKeeper Treasury analysis that identified them wasting $50 billion? The waste on that program was equivalent to some of the largest programs in Commonwealth government history. Giving JobKeeper money to companies that didn't have a decline in revenue—to Harvey Norman, to private schools, to Qantas, to hundreds of companies whose profit went up—was perhaps the biggest fiscal waste in Australia's history. That is the waste that drove up inflation on their watch. The simple reason is that they were profligate and took their eyes off the macroeconomic ball.

That's not the only reason inflation went up. There was a war in Ukraine and there were supply chain issues, but, to the extent that government action is part of those reasons, it was their government not ours.

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