Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

Once upon a time there was a little chicken running through a village shouting, 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling!' Everyone laughed. They laughed because it was too much—too over the top to be real. But let's picture her for a minute not in a village, but in a supermarket. She's in the Easter aisle, surrounded by pretty foil wrappers, and everything looks exactly as it should. She reaches for a 300-gram bag of mini eggs and turns it over—$37! Since when is a bag of Easter eggs $37? Suddenly, she's not a chicken; she's a mathematician. That bag is 11 bottles of milk. It's 12 loaves of bread. She grabs a 100-gram Cadbury bunny instead—$9.50! That's three loaves of bread for one hollow ear. Even the hot cross buns are $1.38 a pop. I suppose we should be grateful. The real miracle of Easter is finding a chocolate egg that does not require a second mortgage.

Here's the part that isn't funny. Families are skipping Easter. One in six Aussie kids are growing up in poverty. Forty-five per cent of people are too ashamed to ask for help. One in three households are wondering what, if anything, they can put on the dinner table tonight. It won't be chocolate, that's for sure. The Albanese Labor government is saying, 'Everything is under control,' while families are frantically doing mental arithmetic in the aisles. The sky is falling. It sounds like a bad April Fools' joke, except it isn't; it's just what it costs to live right now—#costsofcelebratinginaustraliaunderthealabaneselaborgovernment. (Time expired)

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