Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

The government made some very grand promises to the people of Australia before the election. They were promises that we on this side warned were either ineffective or not so simple to implement. But this Labor Party and the Prime Minister said, 'Let's throw caution to the wind turbines. We'll just legislate now and work out how it all works later. And, until then, we'll just blame everybody else.' Sadly, those empty promises worked—the electorate bought them—and got them into government, because these lofty goals, understandably, sounded wonderful. But once again we've seen the reality. Labor has no real plan, Labor has no detail—only ideology. And, when that ideology hits reality, we know what Labor does next. It comes for your hard-earned money. It uses your income to prop up its own failures.

This government has had more than enough time now to either deliver or come clean to the Australian people on its election promises. They said, 'We'll bring down your mortgages.' But all Labor has managed to do is make a mess. To deal with inflationary pressures, we have seen nine consecutive interest rate rises, but, when the Treasurer and Prime Minister would rather write essays and go to music festivals than work in tandem with the Reserve Bank to bring down inflation, what else can you expect? As Australians with mortgages buckle under the pressure of a 10th consecutive interest rate rise, the Albanese government's only solution is to break promises and increase taxes. A person with a typical mortgage of $750,000 is now paying $1,700 more per month than they were when interest rates started rising in May. That's an extra $20,000 a year for the average Australian family. Interest paid on mortgages grew by 23 per cent during the December quarter. Families are therefore being forced to pull back on other spending, and household savings are plummeting. Many mortgage holders are starting to feel the pinch; they're struggling to find the money necessary to just make the repayments. What we're staring down the barrel of is an increased number of defaulted loans in the months ahead.

Australians are being forced to tighten their belts on their budgetary spending, as household bills continue to skyrocket. Research has shown that nearly half of all Australians have cut back on purchasing things like take-out, while a third have resorted to buying less meat and seafood. So why is this government sending this country back to the Dark Ages? That could become a literal question this winter if energy prices and supply continue down the path they're on—blackouts for the east coast. Australians have been warned by AEMO that there'll be energy rationing and blackouts in the coming years, due to the early retirement of coal and gas generators, along with construction delays to Snowy 2.0 and the Kurri Kurri gas plant. When the coalition left office, there was no reliability gap. Labor's lost control of Australia's energy system.

This government has harped on about how they're championing the cause of the elderly, but, under this government's watch, we've seen more deaths in aged care than during the first two years of the pandemic. More deaths in aged care since this government came to power than during the first two years of the pandemic—just let that sink in. They're hard numbers. They're not things you can fudge. They're not something you can yell and point your finger backwards about. These are hard figures. More people have died in aged care since you came to government than in the first two years of the pandemic. That is the hard, cold truth.

The reality is though, as we head into this winter—and it's an absolutely appalling thought, with these blackouts that are being predicted, this energy shortage and this supply shortage—I sincerely hope it is not a very, very cold winter, because very cold winters, high energy prices and budgetary pressures on family incomes mean that people don't put the heater on. What does that mean for the elderly? It means there will be deaths. We know that there are dire consequences when elderly Australians do not provide heating for themselves in their home because they cannot afford to do so. That will be firmly and squarely on the shoulders of those opposite, due to their recklessness, the fact that they have no plan and, when they do attempt anything, it is market intervention that is going to make every single problem worse, as market interventions all too often do.