Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The cost of living is affecting all Australians. For some, it's a death by a thousand cuts. Rarely is it the cruelty of a single brutal decision that everyone could see and oppose. It's the cruelty of endless poor decisions and bad policies, each one small enough to wave through, each one defended by the government as maybe modest, maybe reasonable, maybe even incremental. And then, one day, an Australian sits down at their kitchen table, adds it all up and realises there's nothing left to give and nowhere left to turn. They realise, hopefully, that it's actually not them; it's this Labor government. That is what incrementalism does. Most people don't really notice it until it's too late. It's like the frog in the boiling pot.

I want to tell you about Patricia, a retired widow from Dicky Beach. Patricia kept her private health insurance after she lost her husband because she believed it would protect her. Despite being a pensioner, she sacrificed what she could to afford her private health insurance. She recently used the Sunshine Coast University Hospital and voluntarily claimed through her insurer, returning more than $6,000 to Queensland Health. That's the kind of citizen Patricia is. Under this government's rebate changes, she now stands to lose more than $1,000 a year for the privilege of doing the right thing. But here's the thing: thanks to the cost of living not being a priority for this government, Patricia doesn't have $1,000 to spare. Her choices are bleak. Now, I want to tell you about John. He's 68, renting in Golden Beach. He just had a rent increase of 60 bucks a week. And the deeming rate changes have just cut his pension instead of lifting it. John says he'll cope by cutting back on dining out. That doesn't just hurt John; it hurts the cafe down the road, and it turns John's retirement into survival. Let me tell you about Helen and David, who wrote to me. They worked. They paid their taxes. They did everything they were asked to do. Now, they're telling me that every bill eats into the savings they spent a lifetime building. Their message to me was simple. 'Don't drop the ball; we need you,' they said.

The Australia Institute found that over half of Australians say their household is worse off than just two years ago. For those on fixed incomes, that number climbs higher still. Under this government, under Prime Minister Albanese, we have seen the sharpest decline in living standards across the OECD, the sharpest decline in living standards, driven by energy bills this government promised to bring down. Higher rents, higher electricity bills, higher gas bills, higher insurance bills—you name it; it has gone up. The Smith Family tells us nine in 10 low-income families now worry they can't afford to put school shoes on their kids' feet. That's not bad luck. It's not an unavoidable global headwind. This is the cumulative weight of bad choices by a bad government made one after the other after the other and felt savagely by people least able to absorb them.

Government is not simple. I know that. We've done it. It's complex; it's hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fooling themselves, but complexity is precisely why discipline matters. The coalition's record is one of managing the nation's finances as though they were our own. And if we are given that opportunity again, we will be very careful with the Australian taxpayers' dollars, unlike this government.