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

I welcome the debate that's been brought forward by Senator Hanson, because we just haven't heard enough from the government about the most important issue facing Australian families, and that is the cost of living. It is the most common issue that's raised with me. When we get out of this place—we'll get out of it soon—I'm sure we'll be inundated. When we go back to our electorates, when we go back to watching our kids at the soccer fields and the like, people will go, 'Jeez, everything is costing so much in this country, and why is it?'

The biggest reaction I had on budget night—now we're finishing these budget sessions, so it was back in early May, six weeks or so ago—was, 'What are they doing about the cost of living?' There was just no mention of it. It was it was just completely ignored by this government, despite it being consistently the most important issue that's raised by Australians as what's wrong with the country right now. It comes through in all of our polling that all political parties do. The cost of living is right up top, way, way above everything else. But there was not even a mention of it in the budget speech six weeks ago. It's the major economic plan from any government each year, an annual statement they make on what their plans are for the economy, and it was pretty clear the government had no plan on this.

In fact, it was the first budget speech this government has given—they've given four of these now—where they did not even mention and did not promise to lower electricity prices. It was a core promise of this government when they came to power that they would lower your electricity bills. The Prime Minister infamously said it almost 100 times on the hustings in the 2022 election that he and the Labor Party won. They promised that they would lower your power bills by $275. It hasn't happened. In every budget speech they gave, though, until this one, they repeated the promise—that is, they wouldn't repeat the $275 figure; they dropped that pretty quick, but they repeated the promise that their investments in these renewable energy things, their investments in hydrogen, their investments in batteries would lower electricity prices for Australian families. That was until this one. It didn't happen. They never got there. They never reduced electricity prices. The average family's bill has gone up at least $500 since this government came to power, but many families with larger households, with kids, end up with bills that are $1,000 or more than what they were four or so years ago.

It hasn't happened, but the government did keep up this myth, this idea, that, 'while we don't have these discounts today, come back to the pub tomorrow, and there'll be free beer. There'll be free beer tomorrow. Just hold you out,' like at the Ettamogah Pub. 'There's free beer tomorrow.' But, when you come back tomorrow, the sign is still there; it hasn't changed. That's what this government's economic pressure was, but at least now it's had to drop the sign, because people have come back enough years to realise this is a trick; this is a ruse. So now they're not even promising to lower electricity prices and therefore lower the cost of living.

Instead, they've now sought to distract the Australian people with a massive big tax grab, with a policy that they don't really know what the impact will be on the property market. Let's say a few prayers for our banks, for our financial institutions, for property! The government has no real idea of what it's doing at the moment. It's making up things as it goes along. So we come back to asking: what is the plan here?

There's a very strong reason why this is the most important issue, why people see this. They're not fools. They can see. When you get to the checkout now—and often you're at these self-service things—you can see it; you can see that the bill goes up every time you scan. You look down at your basket and you look back at the checkout and you think, '$50 doesn't get you much these days, does it?' It's hard. I find it hard. I've got five kids. It's hard to actually buy stuff for dinner that's less than 50 bucks if you want some meat, some protein. It's expensive stuff. If you're not just going to do noodles or something, if you're going to actually give your kids a healthy dinner, you struggle to get it under about 50 bucks. That's what it used to cost to go out; you'd go out for a takeaway meal and you might spend 50 bucks or 60 bucks. That was a special night. Now every night making dinner is a real challenge. You're left with tacos to get something reasonable, but even the price of that has gone through the roof. Forget about doing a steak on a regular basis. It's out of control.

In a country like ours, we should be able to offer every Australian family to be able to afford a steak for themselves and their kids. We've got all this cattle. We've got all this land. Why can't we afford it? Because we impose all these costs on farmers, on our food production. The farmers have to make money. The processors have to make money. They're being loaded up with so much cost that all of that has to be passed through.

I want to use a stark Australian example here to hammer this home. I just checked this while I was listening to Senator Hanson. It's a comparison I've used a few times, but I just made sure it was still the case. I looked up Woolworths. At the moment, if you go down to your local Woolies to get yourself a pack of Tim Tams, to eat while you watch the footy over the weekend, that's going to set you back six bucks. That's six bucks for nine Tim Tam biscuits. That's 66c a biscuit these days. At least it might be good for your diet! You won't want to have too many of them.

If you have a look—all this stuff's online now; you can check it easily—you can all see how terribly this government has managed our economy. If you go to Walmart in Canada, a pack of Tim Tams is Can$3.98. If you convert that, at the current exchange rate they're about the same; we're about parity, so it's $4.08. That is compared to six bucks here. So it's Can44c. If you're a Canadian, good luck to you! You get your Tim Tams for Can44c each. How is it that a basic Australian staple is now costing 33 per cent more, a third more, in Australia than it does in Canada? How has that happened? Have we lost a war or something? What happened? Why?

There's one big difference: Canada uses its energy resources. It's always proudly used its oil and gas, even while it's had hopeless left-wing governments. Even this current one has completely scrapped all their carbon taxes. They've moved away from all this rubbish in Canada, even under a left-wing government. They had to scrap the Trudeau government because they were failing all these issues, but even under the Trudeau government, every time I went there, they were still massively oil and gas. They promote their resources. They promote their industry. They're proud, in Alberta and these provinces, of their industry. They export it to the world.

But this country has followed a naive approach, a different approach, where we've denigrated them. This government denigrated our coal industry and denigrated our gas industry. We still export it to the world. We do that, just not proudly. We let that happen because the government needs the revenues to pay its bills, to cover its wasteful spending; we just don't use the resources ourselves. We deny ourselves the use of the resources.

The government's only response now is to provide more and more subsidies—that have run out now, for electricity, at least directly. Let's see your electricity bills go through the roof. They're reliant now on an unbelievably wasteful home battery scheme. This is one of the greatest scandals in Australia's fiscal history. A scheme that was meant to cost around $2.8 billion is now $12 billion. This home battery scheme has blown out by six times. Then they have the temerity to say, 'This is a cheap form of power.' How is it cheap? It's $12 billion. You're all paying for that—people pay for that—just not through your bill. You pay it through the debt that we're racking up and the interest we're going to have to pay on that debt. It's still being paid for; it's not cheap. It's $12 billion for those batteries—and counting. So that hasn't helped.

But, more to the point here, this fundamentally misunderstands the importance of energy to our economy, because this government has been trapped in this political spin on energy where it only really views the energy question at the household level, through people's household bills. And that's very important—the electricity bill is very important to everyone. You can see it. You know how much it's costing. So, when the government come along and say, 'We'll give you a battery; we'll give you a rebate for a few years,' they think they've solved the problem. But the problem is that the electricity that households use—that pops up on your bill—is only about a quarter of the energy used in Australia. Businesses use four times the amount of power that households do, in Australia. The power that goes into making Tim Tams, that goes into making bread, that goes into refrigerating and transporting milk—that energy use is way, way more than what we use to run even our air conditioning or dishwashers or TVs in our homes. It's just off the scale.

What happens is, when electricity prices go up, when energy prices go up, yes, you feel the impact through your bill, but you actually feel it a lot more keenly through your shopping trolley. It's a silent cost increase—well, it's not silent; you see it, but people don't know it. They don't see it on the Woolworths docket. You don't see, 'Okay, this is the amount that it's gone up by because of electricity costs.' It's just embedded in all these products, embedded right through our economy.

The National Party did some work on this a few years ago in partnership with our research centre, our think tank—the Page Research Centre. They did some work and looked at what the impact of the increase in electricity prices is on the average household bill. They found that the cost from the higher energy prices we've seen under this government was over $3,000 extra. So, as I said earlier, electricity bills have gone up by maybe about $500 to $1,000 depending on the size of your home, but your other costs, the costs of buying things at the shops, have gone up another $3,000. That's the impact on Australians; that's why people are feeling this cost-of-living crisis. And that's why the government's gaffer-tape-type solutions at a household level are not going to work. They're not dealing with the fundamental problem, which is the efficiency, the productivity of our electricity sector.

That brings me to one of the most important issues here, and that is the productivity of our economy. The government's been making a big play this week of the fact that on 1 July, yesterday, the minimum wage went up 4.75 per cent, saying: 'Great! Your wages are up 4.75 per cent.' It sounds good; that's a pretty good increase if you just look at it at that level. What the government don't say—or they don't say it in the same sentence—is that their own budget papers that they released at the start of this sitting period say that inflation this financial year is set to be five per cent. So your minimum wage goes up by 4.75 per cent, but the price of everything, on average—sometimes it's going up by more than that—is going up by five per cent. Now, either the government are just completely deceiving you or they're not very good at maths, but five is greater than 4.75. So, if the price of everything you buy is going up five per cent and your wage is going up 4.75 per cent, you are not better off. You're worse off. You've gone backwards.

That's why the government's rhetoric on wages going up is falling flat, because people are not stupid. They can see that their living standards are falling at a rate we've never seen. The first four years of this government have seen the worst performance in our productivity in our nation's history—and it's not even close. In fact, we have never had a four-year period—four consecutive years—in our nation's history where productivity growth has been negative. Sometimes it dips, it goes down, but it has always stayed even just slightly positive over any consecutive four-year period—until now. This is a record-setting government in a negative fashion. They have set the record: productivity growth has fallen over this first four years of their government, and not just by a little bit; it's fallen by five per cent. It is a five per cent fall in just four years.

That's why we can't get real wage increases. It's why, when wages started going up, as they did last year, inflation broke out again. We had the highest inflation rate before the Iran war—so before the war, before the increase in fuel prices, we had the highest inflation rate in the developed world. That is because, without productivity, you can't offer higher wage increases without it leading to this increase in prices and this spiral. The Reserve Bank had to increase interest rates again. After a small respite last year of a couple of reductions, we're now back to increasing rates—and we might get another one before we're back—and that's because we just haven't dealt with a major issue.

The government had a productivity conference last year. They had a roundtable with lots of fanfare. They invited all these business leaders and everybody to come here. But, just like in their budget, they ignored the major issue. They ignored electricity prices; it didn't rate on their agenda. If you look at what's happened to productivity in our country at a sectoral level, there is an electricity issue. Electricity is a sector that's gone down massively in the last 20 years—a 20 per cent reduction in our productivity in electricity. The mining industry's had a similar reduction, although there are some specific issues there that I don't have time to go into—particularly around the terms of trade booms—but it's electricity where we could have a big impact. If we got that right, it would make a huge difference to our nation's prosperity, our wealth and, ultimately, the living standards of Australians—and, ultimately, the price of Tim Tams in our shopping trolleys!

But the government's waved the white flag on that. They don't have a productivity agenda. They don't have a growth agenda. They don't have an economic plan about getting inflation down. Their plan amounts to taxing you more. That's what they've got. They've got a massive, big tax that they think will crash prices in the housing market and will somehow help. I don't know how hurting our economy, our most important asset, is going to help. We need a government that focuses on the real issues. We need a government that focuses on the cost-of-living crisis. We don't have that right now, after this budget period.