Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

What we just heard there was the government's complete inability to defend its own record. They were given ample time to defend the economic situation of this country, what they've done and what their plans are to fix things, but, instead, almost all of that time was taken up by dredged-up quotes from members of the House of Reps—at least, at the end, there were quotes from someone from this chamber taken from years ago. I don't think the Australian people right now want to hear from their government about what other people said years ago about different issues. What they want to know is they have a government that understands that there is a major problem with the economic circumstances of this country and that they have a plan to fix that.

Right now, Australia has the highest inflation rate in the whole developed world, and we just heard before from Senator Sheldon who said that that's fine. His approach is to sit there in the burning room with a cup of coffee saying, 'Everything is fine.' It's the highest inflation rate in the developed world. How can the Australian people believe that they have a government that is going to fix this dire circumstance if they cannot even admit that there's a problem? The first thing you have to do to fix something in your life is admit that you have problem. You're watching too much TV or eating too much junk food. If you can't admit that you've got a problem, you're not going to fix it. This government cannot bring itself to admit that its addiction to massive increases in government spending is causing problems. It is fuelling inflation. It has left Australia facing the highest inflation rate in the developed world. It means the increase in grocery prices, fuel prices and energy bills are higher here than anywhere else in the developed world.

Instead of admitting that problem, we saw in question time that the government continues to gaslight Australians and say, 'Everything is fine.' Senator Bragg rightly pointed out that the latest economic data released this week, the so-called national accounts, which is sort of like a tape measure across the whole Australian economy about how things are going, showed that public sector demand—that is, the spending of the government—is growing at a rate double that of private sector demand, which is the spending of everyone else—that is, the private sector. That's a clear fact. In these figures this week, the facts are that public sector demand went up by 0.9 per cent, year on year, and private sector demand by 0.4 per cent. So it was double the growth in private sector demand.

Instead of accepting that that might be just a bit of a problem in a high-inflationary environment, the finance minister said, 'No, but the contribution to growth is about the same.' The reason for that is that the public sector is much smaller than the private sector. So even though it has a faster growth rate, its contribution to the overall economy is necessarily going to be less; it's always almost certainly going to be less, unless you're in a remarkable period like COVID. That defence by the government is complete gaslighting of the Australian people. It makes no economic sense to use that measure when judging whether this massive growth in government spending is actually contributing to a problem.

But we don't need to go through the weeds of the national accounts to see that there is an issue here. We can look at very clear numbers about the state of government spending in this country. The last budget before any COVID measures were put in place was for 2018-19, and I've got the figures here. The federal government, on the people's behalf, spent $478 billion that year. In this financial year that we're in now, with the latest update, the figures went up again in December. This financial year your government, on your behalf, is spending $786 billion. That is an extra $308 billion compared with pre-COVID levels of spending. It's a big number. What does that mean?

There are about 10 million households in Australia. I'm using some rough numbers here, but it's about 10 million households. And $300 billion across 10 million households is an extra $30,000 per household that the Commonwealth government is spending on your behalf. This is every year, going on our nation's credit card, because we're borrowing all this. Do you put $30,000 on your credit card every year? Do you think that would be a wise decision? That is what your government has been doing since COVID. We ended JobKeeper. This government inherited a situation where we'd spent a lot of monty during COVID. We ended those programs, and the government replaced it with more government spending, which has fuelled inflation and led to this country having the highest increase in prices of anywhere in the developed world. If we want to lower that, if we want to give Australians relief, we need to cut this obsession with excessive government spending.