Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

Let's have a think about what has happened this week as a result of inflationary pressure—the uptick in the inflation numbers. Interest rates have risen. What does that mean for people? It means their mortgage repayments have risen, and it means the cost-of-living crisis just got a lot worse. That's a serious problem for people out there who live in the real world—not in the chamber, where sometimes people are more interested in talking about political games than what actually matters to people.

There's a lot of duck and spin in parliament this week about why this has happened, but I want to put some points together and try and link them logically; try and follow with me. Firstly, the government's failing energy policy is putting the retail cost of energy power up. It's going up because the policy's a dud. It's based on ideology, not reality—and if you want to know that, talk to RepuTex.

In an attempt to paper over this failure, with sleight of hand the government gives out energy rebates—one of a very great number of government spending measures by this Labor government that thinks fiscal responsibility is an optional extra. The Treasurer thinks: 'That's okay; we'll give out energy rebates and that will reduce the headline rate of inflation. No-one will notice and everything will be rosy for the economy.' The issue for the Treasurer is the RBA are a bit smarter than that, and they take into account the trimmed mean inflation number as well; therefore, interest rates have gone up. Before people talk about criticising us about the rebates: we wouldn't have had such a ham-fisted energy policy that increased prices in the first place. What does this mean? It means it's getting more expensive to get a mortgage. If you're already paying one off you're paying a lot more, and the cost-of-living crisis is now affecting you even more than it was. If you aspire to buy a house, it just got a lot harder because you're going to need a lot more in your repayments.

Not only is that an issue; business is getting harder and harder to do in Australia. I go around my electorate of Nicholls, which has the Goulburn Valley, one of the great entrepreneurial places in Australia. We have a high proportion of private sector economic activity as opposed to public sector. You go out to those farms and to those factories, and you can see what's driven Australia and why so many migrants over many years, as soon as they get off a boat in Sydney or Melbourne, come to Shepparton—because it's the land of opportunity. It's inspiring to see what those people have done and will continue to do. But all those people who run these businesses are telling me it's getting harder to do business. Why? Because the imports are getting more expensive. There are so many examples of that. If you run a farm, fertiliser is more expensive because of energy prices. If you're running a business, wages are going up because there are people who don't understand that if you put too much energy into the public sector there's a rise in the costs for the private sector. It doesn't mean we don't want higher wages across the board, but there's got to be that balance. Keating understood there had to be a balance and Costello understood there had to be a balance, but I'm not sure this Treasurer does. I'll quote Judith Sloan from the Australian, who said yesterday in the paper:

… it is becoming increasingly clear that Chalmers doesn't understand how the economy works.

I don't know when that has been said about a Treasurer in the past.

I also want to just touch on, in the minute that I've got left, and address some of the dishonesty in the debate about what Labor inherited. I wasn't in this place during the last term of the coalition government. I was out working in the private sector. I can tell you that when COVID hit it was very frightening for those people who had businesses. They thanked Josh Frydenberg for looking after them by introducing JobKeeper. That did put some pressure on the budget, and it did put some pressure on inflation. But I remind those opposite that they wanted to spend $81 billion more for JobKeeper and other measures during COVID. So how much worse would it have been coming out of that absolute crisis had Labor occupied the Treasury benches then? I think it's a really important thing to remember when people are saying, 'What we inherited.' They have very short memories, and I remember how difficult that time was for the private sector and the fact that the previous coalition government actually looked after them during COVID.

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