Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Was that five minutes? It felt like about 50! But I think it was five. Anyway, I'll try and compose myself and we will get back on track. That was excellent!

I'm often reminded, when I come in and hear contributions like that, of the words of the late, great Margaret Thatcher, who said words to the effect of—don't quote me—'The problem with communism is that ultimately you run out of other people's money.' We are seeing almost the embodiment of that principle across the other side of the chamber. The answer to these six consecutive, I think, quarters of recession in this country is not to just keep blaming those before you or getting out the big novelty cheque and running it around. That's just not the way this is done.

I'm old enough to remember what the product of these types of policies, this so-called progressive agenda, was. I don't know why it's always called 'progressive'. You wouldn't want to progress too far, if this is where we're going; we'll progress right off a cliff if we continue to take this path. But I can remember what this was like. I had a very early introduction to this, as a young man, an adolescent, going to Victoria in the early nineties and seeing the product of a very socialist Victorian government, on top of the always socialist Labor government, here, federally. Seeing what that did to the state of Victoria—in particular, to the city of Melbourne—was a very early lesson for me as a young person. So, when I come into this place and hear these excuses and these harebrained political schemes, it's often something that I look back on.

This is, of course, a government whose Prime Minister made a solemn promise to the Australian people that Australians would be better off. Well, that is extraordinary. We've had, I think, something like nine quarters since the federal election in May 2022. Six of them have been in recession; I think six out of nine have been in recession. That doesn't sound like a country that, ultimately, is better off, frankly.

When you drill down into the statistics on this, it becomes even more alarming. The price of gas in this country is up 33 per cent. The price of electricity is up 14 per cent. The rental prices in this country are now up 16 per cent across the country. On healthcare costs, we hear all the time about how that side of the chamber is doing it for the man on the street, but in fact these are the sorts of things which actually hurt—an 11 per cent rise in healthcare costs. Education is up 11 per cent. Food is up 12 per cent. And insurance, the sleeper—this is the one that gets business, of course, all the time—is up 17 per cent since this government came to power.

These are actually some of the worst national account figures since the early nineties—the slowest GDP growth, in fact, since the early nineties. Australians ultimately are experiencing a decline in their living standards of something like 8.7 per cent in real disposable income in per capita terms.

We can hear about how people walk into the offices of those opposite, thanking them for giving them their money back in terms of some offset. But what people really want is a government with a plan. This government doesn't have a plan. It's written on a piece of paper. It's like Run,Spot, Run. It's not a plan; it's just a whole lot of words jumbled together with the word 'progressive' tacked onto them. It's not going to take us out of this. This is a product of Australians putting their trust in this government that has breached that trust.

Even the Salvation Army now are talking about the catastrophe. There was a story that they recently put up on their website about how 40 per cent of Aussie households have struggled to afford household basics in the last few months, and over half of Australians now say that they won't be able to pay an essential bill over the next few months.

This is the Australia that this Labor government has created. This is the Australia that it has given us, on top of ambit promises—simple-word statements like 'a future made in Australia'. Well, what does that look like? What's this country going to look like if we go through another three or four years of this? It's going to look like Venezuela. It might even look like Somalia. Who knows? We are constantly finding out things we didn't want to know about how government can be run, and that masterclass is being put on by those opposite.