Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Just. Exactly! Just—I'll take the interjection. It's a cost-of-living measure that the opposition might just support, because, having listened over the last few days of the last sitting week to a whole bunch of those speeches—we'll call them speeches—about this bill to freeze the excise on draught beer and excise-equivalent customs duties, you wouldn't actually be clear whether they're going to vote for the bill, because the speeches are couched in negativity and division. There's no joy; it's all division.

Anyway, my deeply considered and thoroughly original speech will start with a quote. I want to quote the member for Paterson:

We all know Australians have endless names for beer—a frothy, a cold one, a schooner, a pint, a middy, a jug, a stubby, a tinny, a longneck, a pony, a coldie, a bevvy or a brew.

Whatever you call it—and it does vary—it was one of those things that, when I first started travelling interstate as a young adult, was deeply confusing. When I'd go to the pub in New South Wales, I'd order one thing and get another. Then I'd go back to my home state of Victoria and order the same thing I'd learned about and I'd get a different thing. But wherever you are in Australia and whatever you call it, this bill is good news for beer drinkers, and it's good news for the hospitality venues, the brewers and the hundreds of thousands of Australians who work in the industries—be they supply chains, farming, agriculture, transport industries and so on—that support these venues.

There will be a two-year pause on the indexation of draught beer excise and excise-equivalent customs duties. The government is standing up for pubs, clubs, brewers and hospitality workers through pausing this beer excise. It's a practical, targeted and responsible cost-of-living measure. It supports small businesses. It protects jobs. It keeps the price of a pint stable for everyday Australians, and that's important. We inherited record inflation. Inflation has more than halved since its peak when we came to government, but this is one of a whole series of measures that the government has been taking to take the pressure off everyday Australians whilst inflation comes down.

There are still a lot of people doing it tough, but we have made significant progress. This decision recognises that local pubs, clubs and breweries are not just businesses. As we heard from the former speaker, it's critically important that the pub, as the centre of community life, often, in regional areas and small towns, is able to survive and thrive, even for those who don't necessarily drink alcohol. And those who don't drink beer can have a zero beer—they're everywhere now. So often it's the local hospitality venues and the pubs where the community gathers. They might have their meetings there. I know a lot of our ALP branches meet in the rooms out the back of the pub, after gathering for a meal beforehand. It's really important that these community institutions and commercial hospitality venues—they have both personalities—are able to survive and thrive.

The measure applies to containers between eight and 48 litres, commonly used in these pubs and clubs, and also containers over 48 litres. That sounds like a lot of beer, and it is a lot of beer, but, in the large hospitality venues, that's the size of the beer. That's right.

The policy remains tightly targeted to hospitality operators rather than retailers, so it doesn't apply to off-the-shelf purchases in bottle shops and so on, because it is both a cost-of-living measure and a measure to support small business and to support those hospitality venues. It's a measured, temporary pause that will help keep operating costs stable.

If you're a small-business person and you're looking at your balance sheet and your cost inputs, any opportunity and any line that you can see where you can budget with certainty and go, 'Well, that one's not going to go up for the next few years. I can plan with certainty and give myself a little bit of breathing space and take a little bit of pressure off,' is a good thing. It keeps operating costs stable for small venues whilst still maintaining the integrity of the broader alcohol excise framework.

The Assistant Treasurer, in his second reading speech in introducing this bill, wins the award for best dad joke—or worst dad joke, depending on your perspective so far—where he said he sees it as 'a key part of his role to support liquid markets'. Well, here we are. He's one of the cleverest people in this parliament. He's got a PhD in economics, and that's probably very, very funny, in the economic world, indeed.

There are around 10,000 hospitality venues across Australia which will directly benefit, including pubs, bars, taverns and clubs. I recall fondly my visit to Newcastle where you and I sat on a little stage out the back of a lovely pub in your beautiful electorate and ran a trivia night. I think people bought us beers in jugs, which we drank moderately and sensibly, of course.

Around 75 per cent of those venues are small, family run businesses employing local people and supporting community events, sporting clubs and local charities. As I said, they're not just employers in their own right, not just hubs of community life and not just small businesses making a profit and a livelihood for those who run them; but also, so often, it's that venue that sponsors the local footy team and that will help out in times of need and support the broader community.

This is an anti-inflationary measure, and, Deputy Speaker Freelander, you would have had this in your own community. As we helped Australians through the cost-of-living pressures and the global inflationary crisis over the last few years and worked to get inflation down whilst actually helping people through it, there was a recurrent theme—whatever measure the government put in place was simultaneously opposed by those opposite but not enough. They did this whatever it was, whether it was the cheaper medicines policy or the power bill rebates, which they consistently voted against but also said were not enough The cheaper medicines policy—I think the maximum cost of a PBS script will soon fall to $25. The last time that the cost of a PBS script was $25 was back in 2004. If we hadn't have acted, the cost of a PBS script today would be over $50 for an average family. The energy rebates; the cheaper medicines policy; free TAFE; extending the GP bulk-billing incentive to all Australians, which kicked in on 1 November; as well as the tax cuts—it all adds up.

Those opposite have criticised those policies for never being enough and for not going far enough, yet they went to the last election—this is pretty astounding, actually, for the party that claims to be the party of lower taxes—promising to raise taxes. They opposed Labor's tax cuts. I am pleased—as I said earlier, I think they're going to support this bill, so we have found a cost-of-living measure which the opposition are going to support. But it does give breathing space to a hospitality sector that faced successive economic challenges.

In my home state of Victoria, pandemic lockdowns as well as the supply chain disruptions coming out of the pandemic as borders reopened, a global phenomenon; rising input costs; and so on—as I said, even for non-beer-drinkers, this is good; it helps the community and businesses that sponsor footy and so on. It also supports Australian brewers, particularly those small and independent producers who supply the draught beer to the local venues. Many of these brewers rely heavily on their keg sales to maintain cash flow and jobs, so pausing indexation will be of great benefit to help to those brewers plan their production and manage their costs—the same logic as I referred to before in relation to a hospitality venue. If you can see that one of your cost line items is not going to go up, you can plan and operate with certainty. Pensioners and those with chronic health conditions can also plan ahead; they can get 60-day scripts and know that the maximum cost of a PBS script for a pensioner in this country—because of the Labor government's budget—is now frozen until 2029 at $7.70. It's the same logic. People can plan around those medicine costs not going up. Brewers can plan around the excise charges on draught beer not going up.

The benefits of this policy, as I touched on earlier, reach well beyond pubs, hospitality venues and brewers. They flow on to the transport operators, equipment suppliers, farmers and thousands of small businesses linked to the hospitality supply chain. The bill also forms part of the government's broader package of small-business support, which included—they're all sitting down, so I'm going to say it—extended instant asset write-offs. These ones are well trained! In question time, or when there are a few more of them, if you say 'instant asset write-off', they kind of lose their minds. They say, 'That was us!' They forget the history of the instant asset write-off. It was the Gillard government that introduced it, and then the Abbott government got elected and wiped it out. Then, under pressure, out of embarrassment and shame, they brought it back. Now we've extended it as a Labor government. It was a Labor initiative originally, and they don't like to be reminded of that.

The pause ensures that small brewers and publicans can continue competing fairly against large multinational producers, which is important to protect diversity and competition in Australia's beer and hospitality industries. This measure is fiscally responsible. It is a pause. It's not some fundamental undoing or undermining of the alcohol excise regime. It's carefully calibrated to be time-limited to help small businesses through this particularly challenging period. The decision shows, as we've heard from many government speakers, that the government is listening and in touch with community life. It understands and appreciates the pressures that small businesses face, and it acts. It doesn't just talk about it; it actually acts to support them. It will help keep local venues open, keep people in work and keep communities connected. Those are values that sit at the heart of the Labor tradition.

I'll finish where I started: around the cost of living. This is, some would say, a modest measure. It's an important measure for the reasons we've outlined in speeches today. It sits alongside practical and ongoing help that the government is continuing to deliver on the cost of living. When you go doorknocking, the cost of living is still the number-one issue. Even though inflation has more than halved, even though we've had three interest rate cuts already this year, even though real wages are growing—we had that data confirmed last week: two years of real wages growth. It's such a contrast with the previous government, where suppressing wages—wages going backwards—was, to quote the former finance minister, a deliberate design feature of their economic management. They actually changed the law before the 2022 to election to cover up the power price rises that were coming down the pipe from the former energy minister, Angus Taylor.

But there's more to be done. I am proud that the national minimum wage and award wages have increased by 3½ per cent. The cost-of-living equation, of course, has two sides: it's money into your bank and money out. Real wages growing, which is a deliberate design feature of our economic management, is helping Australians. Increasing the super guarantee to 12 per cent and increasing the paid parental leave scheme to 24 weeks is making it fairer for families, including fathers. Another $150 in energy bill relief before the end of the year, $10,000 in incentive payments for housing apprentices, and cheaper home batteries are measures that those opposite oppose. I think we heard today that we're up to 136,000 cheaper home batteries, as Australians continue to be world leaders in the uptake of rooftop solar at home and battery storage.

I had the Prime Minister down to my electorate a few weeks ago, in Narre Warren, and we visited a wonderful young family with two cute kids and a dog. They had just installed—a few months ago, in the first possible week, actually—one of the Cheaper Home Batteries. They showed us their electricity bills. They'd basically paid nothing except the supply cost towards electricity, saving hundreds of dollars. They also had a fully electric vehicle sitting alongside a hybrid vehicle. They hadn't even had to put petrol in the hybrid vehicle for three months and they had managed to run both cars off the solar with the cheaper home battery, so Australians are getting cost savings from that program.

I commend the bill to the House. I thank the Assistant Treasurer for introducing it and I thank all of the speakers. I do hope, as I said, despite all of the noise and division and negativity, that we have found a cost-of-living measure that the opposition will bring themselves to support.

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