Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

The No. 1 focus for this government is cost of living. We are focused on ensuring cost-of-living relief for all Australians, but we're also very focused on ensuring that this does not drive up inflation. Providing cost-of-living relief in ways that are meaningful but not inflationary is difficult but not impossible, and the Treasurer has ensured a raft of measures that provide relief for most, if not all, Australians, and in multiple ways for many of them. We understand that family budgets are tight and that the impact of cost-of-living pressures and inflation are being felt around kitchen tables across the country, and that's why we delivered substantial cost-of-living relief in the budget.

We've delivered a tax cut for every Australian taxpayer and bigger tax cuts for more workers. From 1 July, 13.6 million Australian taxpayers will get a tax cut, with the average worker getting a tax cut of more than $1,500 a year. Importantly, this includes those on lower incomes—unlike the stage 3 tax cuts designed by those opposite, which specifically ignored those on low incomes. Australian workers on the minimum wage or low incomes have got significant pay rises under this government. They are also getting a tax cut, because Labor wants Australian workers to earn more and keep more of what they earn.

By contrast, the Liberals and Nationals didn't want Australians on low incomes to get a pay rise, and they didn't want them to get a tax cut. This group of Australian workers that they don't care about includes many young Australian workers and an overrepresentation of women. Ninety-eight per cent of young workers are better off under Labor's tax cuts, and 90 per cent of women are better off under Labor's tax cuts, compared to the tax cuts of those opposite.

Some of the other cost-of-living measures coming into effect on 1 July include $300 in energy bill relief for every household and $325 for one million small businesses. We've increased Commonwealth rent assistance by a further 15 per cent, taking the total increase to 25 per cent, which makes it the first back-to-back increase in Commonwealth rent assistance in three decades. Treasury estimates that our energy bill relief and Commonwealth rent assistance changes will directly reduce inflation by half a percentage point in 2024-25 and will not add to the broader inflationary pressures, because Labor are good economic managers: producing back-to-back surpluses, paying down debt, turning inflation around from the 6.1 per cent we inherited from those opposite, and keeping unemployment at record lows. We've also seen 880,000 jobs created since we came to government—a new record for a government in their first term.

There's still a lot of work to do, but the record of those opposite—back-to-back deficits for nine years; almost a trillion dollars of debt, with not much to show for it; rising inflation; energy prices they had to change regulations to hide before the election—shows the contrast.

We heard the previous speaker say that they want to have a rational debate on nuclear. They have no costings, and no investor will touch it. It's such a good proposition! It's not, really.

Anyway, back to our cost-of-living measures: we've wiped almost $3 billion in student debt, helping more than three million, mostly younger, Australians, with the average worker saving around $1,200. We've also changed the way HECS is calculated so that it will never again go up faster than wages growth. We've provided up to $3 billion to make medicines cheaper, freezing the maximum cost of PBS prescriptions for everyone. That's on top of the 60-day prescriptions, where you get two months of medication for the price of one month. The Liberals already said no to cheaper medicines, no to energy bill relief, no to tax cuts and no to 60-day prescriptions. In fact, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition said they would roll back the tax cuts. When it comes to cost of living, the Liberals always say no. Their negativity is no substitute for economic credibility, and their record shows where they stand.

We are getting on with rolling out billions of dollars of cost-of-living relief that's carefully calibrated to take some of the edge off the pressures that people are under. We've done all this at the same time as we are expecting to deliver back-to-back surpluses for the first time in two decades, overseeing wages picking up in growth to the fastest in 15 years and an earlier-than-expected return to annual real wage growth.

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