Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the motion to take note of the answer provided by the minister to the question asked by my good friend and colleague Senator Cadell. That was a question about the cost of living, which is an issue that I'm hearing a lot about. In my home state of Tasmania, families are struggling, prices are going up and up, and they feel like they don't have the means to address those price increases.

It seems like every single day, at the moment, we are coming into this chamber as the opposition and we are asking questions on behalf of those families in our own states about the skyrocketing cost-of-living. Every time we ask these questions—and they are important questions that the Australian people want answers to—we find ourselves in a situation where the government brushes those questions off and will try to talk about anything else. If this government was something you bought in a store, I think you would be taking it back to the store and asking for a refund. Then you would take that refund and put it towards paying for your power bill, which we know has gone through the roof since this government came to power. Or it might be your grocery bill, which we also know has gone through the roof, or your mortgage payment, which, again, is going through the roof.

The marketing material for this government was very clear. What was written on the box is not the product that Australians have actually got now. If only I could call the ACCC! The government said that if you voted for them your cost of living would go down.. They said that if you voted for them your power bill—each individual's power bill—would go down by $275. They made that commitment 97 times in the lead up to the election. They made it over and over and over again.

Fast forward 10 months, and not only have they broken that promise but they are actually asking for credit for bills going up by more than 10 per cent. They want credit for breaking an election promise, yet they don't want to accept any of the blame for the skyrocketing cost of living that Australians are now facing. Indeed, every time we come into this chamber and we have conversations about the rising cost of living, and we ask questions about that $275 commitment that was made 97 times during the election campaign, all we get from the government is avoiding the question—at best—and—at worst—talking about the previous government, because they don't have anything else that they know how to talk about.

They also promised that they wouldn't increase taxes on Australians. Yet, they've broken that promise as well. In the lead up to the next budget in May, it certainly seems, as my colleague Senator McGrath says, that they are laying the groundwork to break that particular promise—not to increase taxes on Australians—again and again. This is a Labor government which said whatever it thought people wanted to hear to get their vote back in May 2022. But, in fact, this government does the opposite. Under Labor, the cost of living has gone way up, when they said it would go way down.

We know that the Treasurer and the finance minister have looking around to see whose pockets they can dip into to plug the holes in the budget coming up in May. Sure, they promised before the election that they wouldn't do any of that. But, of course, that promise is out the window, like the majority of the promises they made. We saw this when the Treasurer got up on national TV and refused to even rule out capital gains taxes on the family home. Admittedly, the Prime Minister did come and clean up that little slip of the tongue by Treasurer Chalmers, but, like I say, you can't trust this government when they've broken so many promises already. Who's to say that we won't be having another conversation about capital gains tax come the budget in May? It was pretty obvious, when the Treasurer would not even rule out something so obvious as capital gains tax on the family home, that the Labor government are cooking up a long list of possible tax hits on Australians, and the Treasurer, at that point, did not want to rule anything in or out.

But there will be something else. There is always something else when it comes to this Labor government. They promise the world to everyone and quickly run out of money to pay for all of those promises. And when they have run out of money, they will come after yours. The Labor promise to cut your power bill by $275 is broken. Their promise to reduce the cost of living is broken. Their promise not to increase taxes on Australians is broken already, and they are looking for even more ways to break it.