Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of all answers given to coalition questions by government ministers today.

I move this motion with some reluctance, because I don't think that we could, with any level of satisfaction, say that any question was answered today. The government clearly has no respect for the process of question time and has no respect for the entreaties of the President of the chamber, who repeatedly brought Minister Farrell back to the question—entreaties that were continuously ignored by Minister Farrell. It's a real tragedy that questions being asked quite genuinely by members of the opposition around the cost of living and the government's promises to reduce power prices by $275—a number that Minister Farrell refuses to utter—were ignored by the Acting Leader of the Government in the Senate.

It appears that the only thing that we have learnt is that Labor's promises are effectively 100 per cent renegable. We hear a lot about 100 per cent renewable, but the Labor Party's promises are clearly 100 per cent renegable. They're not interested in the fact that they promised Australians a reduction in power prices by $275. They're not interested in the fact that they promised Australians cheaper mortgages. They're not interested in the fact that they promised no changes to superannuation. They're not interested in their promise that Australians would see lower inflation. They're not interested in any of their problems. The concern that Senator Farrell continues to express isn't going to pay high power bills, it isn't going to pay higher mortgage costs and it isn't going to cover the costs of additional inflation.

This government went to the election promising the Australian people that it had a plan to deal with the Australian economy. Yet all we see during question time is this government trying to deflect the problems to somebody else. They don't have the courage to stand up in here and take the responsibility for the decisions that they've made. Only a Labor government could spend $1.5 billion to see power prices go up. Only a Labor government could do that. We know, because we remember that it took the coalition six years to get the budget back to an even keel after the last time Labor were in government. It took the coalition six years to do that.

Labor have started in exactly the same way that they've left off. The Parliamentary Budget Office told us in the lead up to the election, and it's been proven since, they are spending more money—so higher spending, higher deficits—than the coalition. They started the same way they left off last time. Why would we expect any different? During the time we were in government they wanted to spend $300 for every Australian to get them vaccinated—$6 billion extra that didn't need to be spent because Australians lined up to be vaccinated.

We're seeing the same chaos, but worse, we're seeing a complete disrespect for the Australian people and a complete disrespect for the promises they made to them just 10 months ago. All of those commitments, like: 'We have a plan to manage the Australian economy.' Where's any sign of that plan? They promised a reduction in energy bills of $275. The only thing Australians are seeing is power prices going up, and no sign of anything else. They promised that they had a plan to deal with inflation. Where's the evidence of the plan in the context of that, because inflation is at recent high levels of over seven per cent?

They pay no respect to the process in this place, because we did not, effectively, get a single answer to a single question today. The minister did nothing but try and palm off responsibility, not answer the question and deflect responsibility to somebody else, but has not been prepared to stand up and have the courage, as a government should, to take responsibility for the issues that are facing the Australian people. But, much worse, they continue to break their promises to the Australian people.

Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We on this side understand that the rising cost of living is hitting a lot of Australians hard, and that inflation is the defining economic challenge in 2023, as it was in 2022. Australians understand that we didn't create these challenges, but they elected us to take responsibility for addressing them. Australians are dealing with the repercussions of almost a decade of the Liberal-National coalition's inaction on modernising the energy grid and on building strong relationships and facilitating our community so that everyone is welcome and their individual characteristics and skills are accepted and appreciated.

We know that people are able to fully engage in society and the workforce when they can fearlessly be their authentic self. A study conducted by BetterUp found that, when people are able to show up authentically at work, the workplace experiences 54 per cent lower turnover and a 50 per cent increase in team performance, all of which supports an increase in productivity. That's why the actions of some hate-filled individuals outside this building today and outside parliaments across the country throughout the week, including in my home town of Hobart, must be called out. This hate has been countered by love, acceptance and community.

I'm proud to say that the views of the person fuelling this hate are not supported by the majority of Australians—the government certainly does not support them. This government stands with trans and non-binary folk. This government believes equality is a core business. Unfortunately, some senators in this place have given oxygen to someone so damaging.

The facts are so clear: 63.8 per cent of young people who identify as LGBTQI+ have been diagnosed with mental health conditions. Compared to the general population, trans and gender-diverse young people are seven times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. Even more distressingly, transgender young people are 15 times more likely to attempt suicide, compared to the general population.

While there may be a handful of people trying to divide us, choosing to hate, choosing to discriminate and choosing to spread mistruths, there are many more standing in solidarity with trans and non-binary people. How can we tackle some of the most corrosive issues influencing the cost-of-living crisis if people cannot be their authentic selves in society because the risk of doing so is just too great? To increase productivity, workers must feel safe, supported and valued at work, no matter who they are and who they love.

Trans people have a right to live in safety and thrive. Just like everyone else, trans people should be treated with dignity and respect at every single stage of their lives. No-one should ever have to experience such an invasion of their right to exist. I want to make clear to our strong trans and non-binary community: you are welcome here and you are celebrated here. Our message to the LGBTQI+ community is simple: no matter who you are or who you love you should be valued, equal and celebrated.

I also give a shout-out and congratulate the people in my home state of Tasmania and in my home town of Hobart for turning up and supporting our trans and non-binary people. I wish I could have been there with them, but, unfortunately, we were sitting. I hope that the person fuelling this hate understands that Australians do not stand with her.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Brown for her warm and generous remarks. I'm sure that many senators in this place will support her. The matter we are debating at this part of the schedule though is question time. It was quite revealing. Senator Farrell gave us an insight into the Prime Minister's morning routine. Senator Farrell said that the Prime Minister wakes up every morning and thinks about what more he could be doing to help Australian families. That will come as very cold comfort to those Australian families who wake up every morning and ask themselves: 'Why is the Prime Minister, Mr Albanese, and the Treasurer, Mr Chalmers, making my family poorer?'

The cost-of-living crisis in this country is real and it is immediate, and the scale is serious. The best way to demonstrate that, of course, is with the data. Just think for a moment about a family which took out a loan at a fixed rate of 2½ per cent on a residential property worth about $450,000—remembering that the average loan in our country is $600,000. They were paying $2,060 a month but now they're paying at least $2,900 per month on a variable rate of about 5.8 per cent. That's an extra $840 a month, or $10,000 a year, that an Australian family has to find.

I know that Senator Green is sort of smirking and unsettled in her chair over there. Let's think about the scale—

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I—

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's completely unprofessional—

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, when I talk about—

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy President. This fact will make senators uncomfortable and this fact will make Labor senators squirm: how many people—how many mortgages themselves—do those opposite think have shifted from fixed to variable? I know they'll be thinking, 'I've heard that number before; I think that's about 880,000 mortgages.' I can see Senator Ayres there nodding. That is correct. That is the 2023 figure—this year's figure. What was the 2022 figure? It was 590,000. And what is next year's figure? It's 450,000. What does that mean? It means that 1.9 million mortgages are shifting from fixed to variable in the term of this government. And what is their plan for a remedy? The scale of the problem is 1.9 million.

That's not my figure. That figure was released yesterday by Senator Gallagher in answer to a question on notice by me, which was late in being responded to. It wasn't one day late and it wasn't two days late, it was weeks upon weeks late. Why was it that the government thought it necessary to delay the return of its answer to my question on notice which revealed that 1.9 million mortgages were shifting from fixed to variable rates over the life of this government? I know that Labor senators find it tiresome to listen to coalition senators talking about these issues, but the issues are real and they're serious. They're on a scale that I think would surprise many, many people.

So don't listen to Senator Smith. Let's listen to the ACTU secretary, Sally McManus. What did she have to say? She conceded that real wages are going backwards—her words—by a shocking 4½ per cent, and that the wage rises of 2022 and early 2023 have now been, in Sally McManus's words, 'eaten up by price rises and interest rate rises'. The head of the labour movement is saying that the government's lack of action on price and interest rate rises is eating away those very, very modest gains that people might have had in their wages.

When the Prime Minister wakes up tomorrow, I hope that he will wake up with a renewed sense of urgency about the scale of the cost-of-living crisis that is impacting on Australian families across the country. It's serious, it's real and it's on a scale that is unprecedented, and Australian families deserve better.

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What this government takes incredibly seriously is the cost-of-living crisis that Australians are facing. We certainly know that there are incredible pressures on people around the kitchen table, and that is why we're taking action at the cabinet table. But I want to make it clear that what I think Australians take most seriously is Australian taxpayers being left with a trillion dollars of debt and no economic dividend to show for it—because that's what the former government left behind for Australian taxpayers. It wasn't just for our government to deal with and to manage; Australian taxpayers were left with a trillion dollars of debt and nothing to show for it by the Liberal Party.

Australians were left with a budget mess. They were left with a decade of no energy policy to actually deal with power prices or to increase renewable energy. They were left with a government that was more interested in pork-barrelling than it was in investing in our economy, fixing the carer economy, providing opportunities for women to get involved in the economy and making sure that people could have real wage rises. We never saw that in the 10 years under the former government. That's why we sitting on this side of the chamber take these issues incredibly seriously.

It's hard to take seriously the objections of those opposite when they now pretend to care about real wages and about power prices. It's hard to take the Liberal and National parties seriously when they say they care about budget management, when they left Australian taxpayers with a trillion dollars of debt. But they were happy to go and spend that money like Liberal-National money, using colour coded spreadsheets. That is what we are hearing from those opposite today.

What does make me smile, Senator Smith, and what makes me happy is that we finally have a government that's getting on with the hard work of addressing these issues. Since the Labor government started, we've managed to successfully argue for a wage rise for minimum-wage workers, something that people had been waiting for for many, many years. We've delivered legislation to drive investment in cleaner and cheaper energy to put downward pressure on power prices—finally, after 10 years, to have a policy in place! They had 22 policies, and they couldn't land a single one because they're so divided on climate change. They don't think it's real. That's why they never landed a policy. We finally have a policy that we're implementing and delivering to put downward pressure on power prices.

Last year we actually recalled parliament—we got everyone back to Canberra—to put through a bill for energy price relief because we could see this coming down the line and we wanted to put a cap on gas prices. We brought that legislation to the parliament. It should have been a unifying moment for the parliament, but instead those opposite voted against the energy price relief bill. They voted against giving Australian families relief on their power bills.

This government is delivering cheaper child care. That's about to start—in 100 days. I know that it's really hard for those opposite to understand that child care is an economic issue—that cheaper child care is something that will deliver an economic benefit to our country. To have women who are not choosing between a day's work and putting their child in child care and to have that bill reduce over a certain amount of time is incredibly important. That's why we prioritised cheaper child care.

We're delivering cheaper medicines. We're delivering fee-free TAFE for more students. We're expanding paid parental leave to make it easier for families. We're delivering the national housing plan to have cheaper houses, with more funding for affordable homes, but also to make sure that we have housing for people leaving domestic violence situations.

Our government is getting on with the job of reducing the cost-of-living pressures that Australian find themselves under, and it's no thanks to 10 years of complete disunity, disarray and denialism from those over on that side of the chamber. I'm incredibly proud of the work that we're doing and of our Prime Minister for the work that he is doing. We've got a long way to go and we're not afraid of the hard work, but it's no thanks to those on that side of the chamber.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let's start off with the smear about child care that we just had from the other side. As a stay-at-home parent I'm very passionate about child care, and that's why I want child care to be optional, not made compulsory—that you only get child care if you put your child in a childcare centre. I say let's pay the childcare payment to the actual parents and let the parents decide how they spend it on child care. For example, nurses, the police and all those people who work shiftwork can't pick their child up at six o'clock at night. There are other people who work part time, and they may only want to use child care for three or four hours a day and not have to drive 40 minutes to a childcare centre, just like all those parents in regional Queensland that have to drive 40 or 50 minutes off the farm. I don't want to hear from Labor, who only use child care as a means to pay the childcare centres so they can clip the ticket on union fees. No, no, no—our children are much more important than that. They are not a means by which you collect union fees, thanks very much.

Let's go to the issue of the trillion-dollar debt. We actually had $800 billion in debt, and can I say that we were tracking very well. I know that in my first year here as a senator we had a deficit of less than a million dollars, and we had the debt back down to $500 billion after Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard's crazy expenditure. But, unfortunately, we had state Labor premiers create a wall of hysteria. It was like a raging bushfire that they just couldn't control. There were COVID press conferences day in, day out—one at 9, one at 10, one at 11 and one at 12. They were scaring everyone about COVID and wanting more and more money. We still haven't got an audit yet on all that money paid by the federal government to the state governments for COVID cases in hospitals. If you look at the NSW Health data last year, they had more deaths from COVID than what the ABS recorded nationally. So you've got to ask yourself: what type of bookkeeping went on during this COVID hysteria, and was it just a means for these autocratic state health bureaucrats who were locking people down and collecting the money in their back pockets?

That's not to mention the billions of dollars spent on vaccines that all of the premiers mandated on people. It was, basically, you've got to take this vaccine that costs a lot of money, which we're going to pay a foreign multinational for, and it didn't even stop transmission or infection. We found out just this week from ATAGI that, for young people under 30, there's actually greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than from the virus. This was what I stood up for, and no-one listened. Not only did we not get bang for buck, but those people over there, the other side, Labor, have the gall to accuse us of racking up debt, when they were fuelling the fire day in, day out with daily press conferences.

But let's focus on the cost of living, shall we? Heaven knows, all we've been doing this week is talking about identity politics yet again. This is the great distraction for that side of the chamber. These people are only ever interested in command and control. They do that by dividing the people based on identity politics. We've had enough of that, and we've heard that here today in the chamber. We're talking about the cost of living, and suddenly we pivot to identity politics. Do you know why they pivot to identity politics? Because they have no idea how to manage an economy. I know that in my home state of Queensland the Bligh-Beattie government sold all of our infrastructure. I'll tell you how you control costs. If you want to control costs you build infrastructure, and you build power stations—power stations that provide cheap reliable energy that drive down the cost of electricity. That's how you do it. You build dams that provide irrigation to more farmland so you can have cheaper food, and you build better roads. You do it through good economic management and sound monetary policy.

We know that the other side of the chamber aren't focused on the things that matter. They aren't focused on people. That is who put us here: the people. They are focused on empowering their bureaucrats, their superannuation fund managers and their corporate executives. They've taken over the big end of town on that front as well, now, through superannuation. If they were really worried about the cost of living, they would make superannuation optional. Let the workers keep their wages. It's their money. Let them pay off their mortgages. Imagine if we could give that access to the workers. They could access their super, pay down their mortgages and not have to pay these high interest rates. That's the way you deal with the cost of living.

Question agreed to.