Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Beer is something I'm excited to talk about. I rise today to speak on the Excise Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Bill 2025. Beer has a rich history dating back to Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt some 5,000 years BC, where it was actually safer to drink beer than water and it was even used as a form of currency. My own father experimented with brewing and tried to make a Cherry Ripe based beer, which was not flash. You should leave that to the professionals. And, as of now, we are making it easier for the professionals.

Having a beer after a week at work is an Australian tradition—heading to the local with your mates, having a chat, unwinding for the week and, particularly in Far North Queensland, bringing your own stubby holder because the schooner is going to get warm before you finish it. As I travel up and down the cape through my immense electorate, I run community offices during the day, but I know that I'm going to get most of the engagement that night at the local pub, pulling beers and chatting to the road crews, the public servants who are done for the day and the FIFO workers. Everybody congregates at the local, be it the Bamaga Tavern on the very edge of the northern Australian tip, the Wongai pub on Horn Island, the Grand on Thursday Island or the Exchange Hotel in Coen. All of them are the heart of Australia. All of them are places where Australians gather to tell stories, have a great time and, yes, have an ice-cold beer. Knowing that beer is frozen and that it is cheaper brings more people to those environments. It helps our social cohesion and keeps that great Australian tradition of the Friday afternoon beer or the Thursday afternoon beer continuing.

I am very much looking forward to getting home at the end of this week and going to my local, the Trinity Beach pub, looking out over palm lined beaches to the Coral Sea. It's beautiful. My mates are going to gather around, and we are going to have a few beers to celebrate Christmas, to celebrate being together and to celebrate mateship. We've known each other forever. That has been the common denominator: we meet for beers at the pub. It has become a quintessential part of the Australian identity.

But it is about more than supporting the Australian identity and more than a cost-of-living process; it is bringing support to small businesses. We know that it was hard during COVID. Cairns is a service-industry city. You remove the service industry and it makes things very difficult. We need to bring people back into our clubs and pubs, particularly those supporting independent brewers like Copperlode brewery, up my way, who have honoured the member for Kennedy with the Patriot pale ale. I am waiting for mine, but I'm told I have to have been 50 years in the House—at which point I will be 96 or dead! It's testament to what a cold beer means that we have someone like the member for Kennedy held up, placed on a beer and celebrated not just in his community but right across the country. It is a truly special thing. People went to that pub for that beer, supporting that local business. Macalister Brewing, a little bit further north, looks out over the canefields of the western arterial. It has a fantastic array of beer. People go there for the experience—the taps, the kegs and the whole thing. It is part of a North Queensland afternoon. We have so many great breweries and so many great little country pubs dotting the area. We are bringing people back to them.

This is how a lot of people get their first start while at university—getting their RSA, pulling beers and making a dollar. It's their first bit of real responsibility in the workplace. It's how I hope my children will work their way through university, the same way my sister did. It says something about the Australian identity, and I couldn't be prouder to get behind it.

Now I will get to the nitty-gritty of the whole thing. This is a 2025-26 budget measure to pause the automatic CPI increase which used to be every six months. So every six months there would be an increase, two per year et cetera—in February and August. That's a day not necessarily circled in anyone's calendar but a day that rolled around nonetheless. Without these excise increases occurring it will provide the stability that business needs for forward planning and for consumers. Stability is the No. 1 goal that you need to provide for any kind of economic development. People need to know what is coming and how to react accordingly. This freeze gives pub owners and club owners throughout Australia that surety. Be they small businesses, larger pubs or the little country town ones, they'll know what is coming next.

This is obviously a targeted measure. It is specifically for tap beer, for draught beer. That is because that is where our people are. It is holistic approach to cost of living and to encouraging small businesses. It is to get people into the pubs again, to chat again, to make sure that we have that social cohesion, to relearn what it's like to be with each other. The kids that are coming of age now, 17 and 18 years old—like my own daughter, who is 17—will start hitting the pubs in a couple of months. She went through COVID. She missed a large part of her development socially. My youngest daughter missed more. My nephews missed more again. They will rediscover humanity in the pub with a nice cold beer. I am very, very excited for them to do so—responsibly, of course.

This is a cost-of-living measure. It is supporting a lot of people at a lot of places. I know that pubs and brewers in my electorate are welcoming this with open arms. Tap beer, draught beer, is the best beer. It tastes the freshest. It gives you the most bubbles, the best head. I'm sure the consumers will love being able to go down without an excise going up.

This supports jobs. It is the jobs that I want to talk about now. Because of the Albanese Labor government, people in the pubs and clubs pulling beers are now going to have more work because we're bringing more people into the pubs. Their penalty rates are now enshrined. So when they work on Saturday nights and Sundays, when the rest of us are taking our time with our family and friends, they know that they are going to get paid accordingly. They are going to get paid for the time that they are putting in and the time that they are giving up.

As I said earlier, a lot of people use the pubs and clubs as a stepping stone to somewhere else. Fee-free TAFE is available. One of the local guys at the place where I drink wants to be a chippie. He's going to go to fee-free TAFE. He's pulling beers in the meantime to save up for a car. Once he's saved up for a car, you know what he can get? He can get a house. There are five per cent deposits now. We have given an actual pathway. This whole thing is a holistic approach to everything we are doing. It's targeted, but it's so much bigger than that. It's giving people hope for the future. It's giving people industry. It's giving small business surety. It's giving families a place to be. It's giving friends a chance to get together and enjoy themselves. It's something so simple and so well supported that it's still on the Liberal Party's website! That's fantastic. It is great to get bipartisan support on something as important as family and friends getting together.

There are approximately 160,000 workers employed in the hospitality sector—a large chunk of them in the Far North—and I'm proud that we've got behind them. I'm proud of the small brewers that are putting beers on the table every day and of the people that run the clubs and the pubs, particularly those small country pubs that make such a difference in community, and what they mean and what they stand for. I'm super proud to be able to support them. I just say to all of the brewers out there: do not ever put Cherry Ripe into a beer. I commend these bills to the House.

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