Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The temptation here would be to respond to some of the bunkum that we have just heard over the last five minutes, but I would just refer you, Senator Dean Smith, to some of the detail in the report that came from the cost-of-living inquiry, which doesn't appear to provide a great deal of hope at all. It has some pretty wishy-washy recommendations and nothing in terms of any sort of vision from the coalition for people to look at. But there was plenty of evidence gathered through that inquiry to tell us that people did not believe what was being contended by the coalition—and by Senator Hume and now by Senator Smith in this chamber—that the cost-of-living crisis began in May 2022. That's a really convenient tag line for you guys that has absolutely no truth behind it. What a shame! But we don't really like to let truth get in the way of a good story, do we, over there on the coalition benches? It's really not where we're actually making our efforts. No.

What we heard from witnesses, one after the other, when asked the question, 'Did the cost-of-living crisis start in May 2022?' was, 'No'. I think the most comprehensive response we got was from the housing providers. The housing providers—and you can trawl through those transcripts over and over again—peak bodies and people in the housing sector were telling us that this was a crisis in housing that had been brewing for well over a decade, not in two years. We heard it as well from the community sector providers, we heard it from youth workers and we heard it across the board that this is just a political statement you are making that has no truth behind it. For that, you should be ashamed of yourselves. You're just trying to flog a bad story. You're just trying to hoodwink people. The proof is in the pudding. And if you read that report that Senator Hume put out last Friday, it's like a wet lettuce—the recommendations are just empty. I would say that this has been a glorious exercise of wasting everyone's time for two years on the cost-of-living inquiry to turn out precisely nothing other than a bunch of stuff that says, 'We don't like Labor'. Well, hell—we knew that.