Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice asked by me and Senator Hume on the economy and wages.

I would have thought that today with the national accounts data being released that this government would have been prepared to come into this chamber and answer the questions that Australians have on their minds, because Australians know that they are not better off now than they were four years ago when this government came to power. They know that they are struggling to pay the bills. They know that the price of everything is going up and their ability to pay for everything is not going up consistently with that.

We heard in the national accounts data today that public sector demand is growing more than twice as fast as private sector demand. That is a very troubling statistic, because that means that this government is merely fuelling its inflation fire by pouring debt petrol on that fire. To come in here today as the new shadow minister for finance and ask questions of the government about this issue and receive the complete lack of response that I did—the complete equivocation, the constant pivoting to talk about what might have happened when other governments were around and the failure to engage with the substance of the question specifically—is incredibly disappointing. I'm sure Australians listening along at home were disappointed, like me, by the responses that they heard from Labor ministers.

We know that under Labor living standards have declined. Australia has had the biggest fall in living standards, in terms of household disposable incomes, in the developed world. We know that Australians have less purchasing power today than they did four years ago. We are facing higher inflation and higher interest rates. Labor's reckless spending is keeping inflation higher for longer. What I and Australians want to see from this government is a plan to tackle that inflation, to get the economy back under control and to get the budget back under control.

It seems completely lost on this government that they are sitting on a trillion dollars worth of government debt. They will make many comments about where this debt came from. They'll talk about the pandemic. We know they were unprecedented times that required unprecedented levels of government spending; we recognise that. But this government came into power in 2022. They have had four years, and they have gone nowhere near even trying to tackle that government debt. And let's not forget that during the pandemic it was the Labor opposition that wanted to spend an awful lot more money to deal with the problem than the coalition government did, so they really don't have a leg to stand on. But they've been in power for four years now, and they have no plan to get that trillion-dollar debt bomb under control.

As someone who considers herself still, sort of, a young Australian, I find it disappointing, for me and my generation and those Australians younger than me who are going to be left paying the bill on this trillion-dollar debt bomb, to hear that this government has no plan to deal with it, has no plan to deal with the inflationary pressures we're seeing throughout the economy. It has no plan to get its government spending under control, which we know is fuelling inflation. Their government spending is making life more difficult for Australians. It is making life more expensive for Australians. Australians are sitting at home, looking over their household budgets, thinking: 'How am I going to make ends meet this week? How am I going to deal with the fact that insurance is up by 39 per cent, energy costs are up by 38 per cent, rents are up by 22 per cent, the cost of health care is up by 18 per cent, education is up by 17 per cent and food is up by 16 per cent?' Everything keeps going up and up, and they look at the household budget and think: 'How am I going to deal with this? I'm going to have to rein in spending.' That's what Australians will have to do. They will have to make sacrifices.

But this government shows zero inclination to make their own sacrifices. It shows zero inclination to look at its budget and say: 'Hey, where can we start trimming a bit? Where can we start trying to get the trillion-dollar debt bomb under control?' That is going to be a millstone around this government's neck. I know the Treasurer is talking a big game, when it comes to the budget that he will be handing down in May, about trying to get government spending under control. But the proof is going to be in the pudding. I and the rest of the shadow economic team are going to be looking very closely to see exactly what plan Jim Chalmers has to get the debt bomb under control, because, frankly, I think that plan is non-existent.