Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to respond to some of those comments of a moment ago, but I realise this is constituency statements and so I will stick to that.

Under Labor the cost-of-living crisis is getting worse, not better. Families in my electorate of Hume don't need economists or modelling to tell them that there is a cost-of-living crisis—that their standard of living has been trashed by a Labor government that has mismanaged the economy. They feel it every single week. They see it at the checkout when they pay their grocery bills. They see it when their power bill arrives. They see it when they fill up their petrol tanks at the bowser. They feel it when their rent goes up again or when they're left trying to pay their mortgage every month. Under Labor, the cost-of-living crisis is getting worse, not better, and families in Hume are paying the price.

This Treasurer promised that we'd beaten inflation—that it was all over. And what do you know? Up it surges. In fact, the Reserve Bank this week has told us that it is on its way up again—a huge increase in their forecasts. The Reserve Bank raised interest rates, of course, on Tuesday this week, and there's every expectation that there will be more increases in interest rates because of the failures of this government. Labor have treated Australians' money like it was their own, overspending on policies that did not ease the cost of living in any meaningful sense for Australians. And they've left the Reserve Bank to do the heavy lifting. We've got the government with the foot on the accelerator, and so the Reserve Bank has to put the foot on the brake—and that wrecks the engine, and that is exactly what has been happening under this Labor government.

Meanwhile, the supply side of our economy is completely broken. They've clogged it up. They've clogged up the private sector with more regulation. They're driving energy policy based on ideology, not based on affordable, reliable power—and it's good to see the energy shadow right here, who knows this better than better than anyone. They are allowing the construction sector to be held to ransom by the CFMEU. This is how you end up with an economy that's sending out the red lights and the warning bells by saying that inflation is going up and interest rates are going up.

And Australians are suffering. Our standard of living is going backwards, at exactly the time when other countries around the world are seeing theirs improving. This Labor government has failed hardworking Australians.