James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

It's a very tough time to be in the workforce in Australia, because real wages are going backwards and costs are exploding. Official data published by the ABS paints a very stark and difficult picture, and the human suffering we hear of as MPs is even starker. We hear of people who are struggling so much with the household budget at the moment, with real wages going backwards and costs like rents, mortgage repayments and groceries going up. Probably the worst at the moment are electricity bills, which are absolutely exploding on the working people of this nation. As we see this happening, we take the opportunity to debate it in this chamber.

We are talking about the tough times that Australians are having right now, and the contribution from the government is effectively complete denial, a rebuttal of the proposition that it's tough out there. Frankly, if that's what they want to do, if they want to bury their heads in the sand, there will be a very significant political cost for them. No person in the street would be convinced by the arguments just given by government members to a family that's had to cancel a family holiday later in the year or take their kids out of private school because the household budget can't accommodate certain things that it used to. No one would be convinced, if they were stopped in the street, by arguments from the government—arguments like, 'No, things are much better than the statistics show.'

Perhaps, in fact, there is a government policy on the way to abolish the Australian Bureau of Statistics because they are unhelpfully pointing out, on such a regular basis, the reality which the government is denying. The former governor of the Reserve Bank Philip Lowe pointed out the productivity challenge. He has been sacked. It's all over for Philip Lowe because he told the truth about challenges in our economy, and particularly those that are underpinned by the lack of productivity growth in our economy—the negative growth. We have a circumstance now in our economy where real wages are going backwards. That means Australians are getting poorer. That's what that means, and that is the most important thing that we could be discussing and debating, right now, in this chamber. If you were a government that wanted to get re-elected, you'd be looking at that reality and proposing things that are going to turn it around. Nearly 18 months into this government, it's no longer acceptable to talk about the last government. We're happy to talk about our time in government. We're very proud of the custodianship that we conducted over this country—and we are the greatest country in the world. If those opposite want to dispute that all the time in these debates, they're welcome too.

We're proud of where the country was at 18 months ago, but we're very concerned, 18 months into this government, about where we are right now and where we are going. And that is the view that you get when you go out and knock on doors, telephone constituents and go to electorate events. People are struggling. They're doing it tough. They want a government that understands that, takes it seriously and has some serious solutions that are going to turn that around. We don't have that, we know, because when we have debates like this in the chamber, the opportunity to point out all the things that are going to turn that around is not taken by the government. They obsess about things from when they were in opposition. They don't realise they're the government, evidently, or they don't want people to realise that they are the government—that they are almost at the 18-month mark and it is coming up to a point where it is ludicrous to suggest that 18 months is not enough time to make any meaningful impact on the lives of Australians.

What Australians know is that they're going backwards under this government. Regrettably, as statistics come out, we see that this is only getting worse for Australians. This motion about Labour productivity—the statistics you simply cannot dispute are happening on the watch of this government. Australians are going backwards. Australians have less money to meet their household costs that are going up dramatically. We need to take that seriously and not just have important debates like this but have a government that brings forward meaningful measures to address it. Instead, government members in this debate dismiss it and say it's not happening. The statistics and data don't lie, but, most importantly, the people of this country know it because they're feeling it themselves. And if you listen to them, they'll tell you. If we've got have a government that's not listening to the people, then they won't be a government for very long. That's a decision of members of the government, but we in the opposition are going to take the opportunity in this place to talk about these challenges because ordinary Australians are hurting.

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