Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) | Hansard source

This country is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. This cost-of-living crisis is consistently being made worse by the government's actions and their complete failure when it comes to getting inflation under control, in fact every decision they make makes this homegrown inflation problem worse. They are out there spruiking today, as much as they can, the tax cuts they are giving to all Australians. They are tax cuts that have already gone. The cost of everything has gone up so much that these tax cuts are not even going to hit the sides. It really is more smoke and mirrors from those opposite.

But you don't have to take my word for it. We can take the word of the Sydney Morning Herald's Shane Wright. That bastion of conservative values—not—the Sydney Morning Herald, the cheer squad for the Albanese government, have said:

Research compiled for this masthead by the Australian National University's Centre for Social Research and Methods shows average tax rates for 80 per cent of taxpayers will be back to their current levels or even higher by 2027.

But what does that mean in dollar terms, and what's it going to mean by next year? A middle-income earning household will be paying more income tax in 2025 than in the 2023-24 financial year, despite the tax cuts that start from 1 July. How is that possible? If you listen to those opposite, you've all never had it so good! They're doing a fantastic job in the economy! But those of us with mortgages, those of us who have to put food on the table for kids, those of us who have school fees and schoolbooks and driving around to sports of a weekend know how tough it is and how tough it is for the average family to make ends meet. How do we know that? Because we know that the price of food has gone up by almost 12 per cent.

Now, having a household with three teenagers in it, I can assure you that the food bill was never small. But the fact that it is exponentially going up at a rate of knots means families cannot keep up. We know that food banks are seeing more and more working families coming to them for help. The cost of housing is up by 14 per cent. Rents are up by about the same. And remember the $275 that was coming off your power bill, the number that shall not speak its name? Well, we know that electricity prices, and everyone who gets that energy bill knows, have gone up by more than 21 per cent. Remember renewables? They're cheap! They're free! It's all going to be fantastic! What the government can't tell you and what they won't acknowledge is the $1.5 trillion cost of transmission and distribution when you start looking at this renewable wraith that they've got happening.

When you get your energy bill and you open it up, it's not just the cost of the generation. Fifty per cent of the bill is the distribution and the transmission. But the report that the government rely so heavily on, GenCost, to tell you how great their race to renewables is—has the transmission lines as a sunk cost. That means—for those who didn't study economics, which is clearly those in the government—that we don't need to factor in transmission lines; we don't have to factor in distribution costs, because we're going to assume that by 2030 they're already built. So, in no way is this report that they rely on honest, telling the truth to the Australian people. If you've got an average mortgage of $750,000, guess how much money you've had to find since this government came in. Guess how much more you've had to pay in order to pay off that mortgage. It is $35,000—after tax—not quite the amount of money you've got down the back of the couch. But that's what this government has done to the Australian economy.