Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government is failing families trying to balance their weekly budget. Cost-of-living pressures are hitting hard, and now, with the war in the Middle East, it's only going to get worse. The latest Bureau of Statistics inflation figures show the consumer price index rose by 3.8 per cent in the 12 months to January. Housing costs are up 6.8 per cent; clothing and footwear, 5.6 per cent; health, 3.2 per cent; and food and non-alcoholic beverages, 3.1 per cent. Overall inflation is sitting at 3.8 per cent, yet wage growth last year was 3.4 per cent, so it's not keeping pace with the cost of essentials. Effectively, people have less purchasing power now than they did a year ago. All of this pressure on household budgets, while interest rates are also going up, makes it incredibly difficult for first-time home buyers.

Recently, I was chatting with a group of Meals on Wheels volunteers in the Adelaide Hills. This wonderful group of women told me they've never felt such cost-of-living pressures before and they're having to make tough decisions on where to spend their money.

For example, the cost of electricity is an issue that hits particularly hard in South Australia, where residents generally are paying the highest power bills in the country—where we know, as a nation, we're paying some of the highest power bills in the world. We experienced an extraordinary heatwave in January, and that saw increased energy demand, with bills skyrocketing for so many households. The ABS inflation figures show electricity costs rose 32.2 per cent in the 12 months to January, up from 21.5 per cent in December, with the lift linked to the end of the energy bill rebate. During winter I have elderly constituents, pensioners, who can't heat more than one room, who tell me that they go to bed by 7 o'clock so they don't have to keep the heater on at night. Power is an essential, a nonnegotiable, and when power prices go up it's harder for householders and businesses. Businesses pass on the increase to consumers, making everything more expensive and creating more financial hardship on families and households.

We're also looking now at a sharp rise in petrol prices, and some economists say we could be paying a dollar more a litre for fuel in coming weeks. Who pays that? Well, all of us pay that—mums and dads taking their children to school and sport. Regional and rural families are hit the hardest because we don't have the buses and we don't have the train lines, so we can't find alternative transport. If there were a time to cut the fuel excise, it is now. The current rate on petrol and diesel is 51.6c per litre. A temporary reduction would offer significant relief for families. If the government is worried about a loss to the budget bottom line, it could cut its fuel tax credits to the mining industry. It's one of the biggest expenses in the budget.

Let's look at health costs. Those latest inflation figures show that medical and hospital services went up by 4.2 per cent. The main contributor was higher medical fees and private health insurance premiums, and that's about to get worse. The government has just approved a further increase in private health insurance premiums, by 4.41 per cent, and, certainly, my health insurer wasted no time in letting me know about their increase. That's going to hit the hip pocket of more than 15 million Australians who have some form of private health insurance.

The affordability and availability of health care is one of the biggest issues for people who live in my community. The bottom line is people are hurting, and the government needs to do more to reduce the cost-of-living pressures. This means a conversation about the big household costs—like electricity, like the kind of power we generate, like taxes and rebates on fuel. That means talking about rising inflation and interest rates and the economic management or mismanagement that's making it harder and harder every day for Australians to pay their bills. It can't be that in this nation I have pensioners in my community who go to bed before the sun goes down because they just can't afford to heat their homes. We just can't have that in this nation. We can't have electricity so expensive that we don't have manufacturing bases anymore. My state was the powerhouse for manufacturing. We have the highest electricity. We have lost our manufacturing. We have very little time to turn this around, and we must all bring our attention to this to make it happen.