Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Shadow Treasurer) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by coalition senators today.

There are two tales of two economies happening at the moment. There's the tale of the economy that Labor wants you to believe, and there's the tale of the real economy which was revealed this week in the minutes of the RBA meeting. Labor wants you to believe and wants Australian families to believe that everything is fine and that, in fact, the Prime Minister is honouring his commitment of four years ago that life would be better under Labor for Australian families. That's not true if you look closely at the minutes released of the RBA's meeting which was held a few weeks ago to hold the cash rate.

This document makes crystal clear the risks and the poor performance of the economy being delivered by Labor. Let me just share with you a summary of what the RBA has said and what the RBA has revealed in the minutes of that meeting. It has said that international economies will continue to experience above target inflation and concerns about the inflationary effects of the Middle East conflict remain, and that is bad news for the Australian economy. It goes on to say that expectations in Australia of increases in the cash rate—that is, interest rates—continue and will remain through 2026 and into early 2027. It then says that, because of ongoing inflationary pressures, Australian families will have to prepare for the worst. It goes on to say that the Australian economy is experiencing widespread inflationary pressures. The RBA knows it, the government wants to deny it, but Australians live with it every day when they purchase their groceries, when they purchase their insurance and when they pay their mortgage bills.

It goes on to say that consumer and business sentiment is weakening in Australia, that economic growth is slowing and that inflation will continue to exist outside the RBA's preferred range of two to three per cent. That means Australians will be poorer. It means Australians will have to prepare for higher interest rates. The RBA then says that for a further two years Australians will have to experience higher inflation until inflation gets to a sustainable level. It says that the inflationary impacts in the economy will continue to exist over the short term. Finally, it says what Australians already know, and that is that the Australian economy continues to experience poor productivity growth. And, unfortunately, it predicts potential material weakening in regard to the housing market and the negative effect that that will have on consumer confidence and consumption.

It is a tale of two economies. Labor wants you to believe that all is well. The RBA governor—the independent judge, the independent adjudicator of the government's economic performance—unfortunately is saying that things are going to get harder for Australian families because of the policies of the government. There are two interrelated policies that the government doesn't want you to talk about, that the government doesn't want you to know about. One is record levels of government spending, which is fuelling inflation— (Time expired)

Charlotte Walker (SA, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Look, I know it's the end of parliament before the break. Everyone's tired. So it's not a surprise that we've had a pretty mediocre question time from those opposite—if you can even call it that. I know they're all eager to get to the Qantas Lounge and jump on the plane, so it's no surprise that they're just repeating the same old questions.

The coalition's entire housing strategy is to insist that nothing changes and then wonder why nothing changes. That doesn't make any sense to me. When faced with a choice between helping a young family to buy their first home and protecting generous tax concessions for wealthy investors, the coalition never hesitates to show us who they really are and who they'll back. Those opposite do not have a solution to the housing crisis. They are out of touch with what reality looks like for young people at the moment. They talk about young people all the time.

I spend a lot of my time out talking to young people, and they have a diverse range of views. But I wonder whether those opposite actually talk to young people or just say they do. They generally don't vote in a way that would benefit young people. Of the things young people raise with me, housing is one of the top issues. That's why I'm proud to be part of a government that is doing something about the housing crisis. Those opposite sit over there complaining endlessly and blocking legislation, but they won't actually do anything. And the stats do not lie: more than 260,000 Australians have used the five per cent deposit scheme, and nearly 70 per cent of scheme participants are ahead on their mortgage repayments.

We trust first home buyers to make decisions in their financial interest—decisions that support their aspiration to own their own home for the long term. A fun fact for those opposite: first home buyers using the five per cent deposit scheme are less likely to be in arrears on their mortgage than mortgage holders in the mainstream market. We are delivering 55,000 social and affordable rental homes and we're building 10,000 homes reserved just for first home buyers.

But we know investment to build homes alone is not enough, which is why we're training more tradies, building more infrastructure and cutting red tape, including pausing the National Construction Code and fast-tracking environmental approvals. In our most recent budget, we made an investment of a further $2 billion in enabling infrastructure to unlock 65,000 new homes.

Young people are making up a bigger proportion of the voting population than before. Just a word of unsolicited advice: if you want to save the furniture, maybe just reflect on your voting record. It might explain the position you're in. Australians aren't stupid. They see what you vote for. I have some other inconvenient facts for those opposite. In 2019, just over two per cent of homeowners were in negative equity. Now it's less than half of that. Where was this outrage when more than twice as many Australians were in negative equity under the former government? Nowhere to be seen. Those opposite do not care about first home buyers. Their voting record says so.

Westpac recently told the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics that:

… the performance of that cohort over the last few years is where our average book performance is—and … we're not seeing underperformance or more challenges in that part—

(Time expired)

Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, we all saw it today: Labor putting politics over people. We heard about how they've been using algorithms, a computer that says no, with no capacity for a human being to override the decisions of the computer. How is that possible when older Australians, those in the most frail period of their lives, are different? Every single human being is different—life experience, medical conditions and the way that people age. So how is it that the Labor Party for one minute thought an algorithm could work out what they need? And, worse, they couldn't tell us—or wouldn't tell us—how many people on the aged-care waiting list that keeps getting longer and longer under Labor have died who had already had an assessment that they needed care? The number is around 5,000. Just absorb that for a minute. Every person living has someone who's older than them who loves them and who they love in return. It is devastating for people to watch their older people not being cared for as they should be.

There have been so many examples of failure by the Labor government. This week, the coalition received an email from a woman in Tasmania of 76 years of age. She's on her ninth guide dog. That guide dog is essential for her independence, dignity and wellbeing. These are her words. She was on a home-care package that had been covering the cost of those guide dogs at about $5,000 a year. But, under Labor's new home support scheme, her support for her guide dogs is going to be capped at $2,000. It's woefully inadequate, cruel and mean. Imagine being blind, being that age and being frail and then getting the news that the very thing that gives you independence you're going to have to, as you get older, pay for a large proportion of yourself. In her words, she says: 'It's disingenuous to tout the no-worse-off principle'. There you have it—a participant who tells us it's a lie. She's anxious and concerned, and we heard that over and over again from people who had that dreadful algorithm applied to their care.

Waitlists have blown out under Labor. You're only replacing people on the waitlist when people die or go into care, so they no longer need it—again, a misrepresentation of the reality. These people in our communities and their families know it to be true: Labor is putting politics over people. That's the truth of your care of our ageing. (Time expired)

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I was going to talk about housing, but in fact I think I'm going to switch to aged care. We seem to think that, as humans, we are perfect decision-makers. In fact, we are far from perfect. We are riven with internal biases, the most dangerous of which are unconscious ones—the ones we don't even recognise. We have our own blind spots, and we are highly subjective. I know this well because of my career in medicine.

In medicine, we have multiple scoring tools, clinical decision support tools, or what are called, in this House, algorithms—so many. We have the APACHE score for critically ill people. We have the Apgar scores for newborns. There is the Glasgow coma score for people who might be losing consciousness. There is the Framingham Risk Score for people with cardiovascular risks, when you're trying to weigh up whether you need to give them certain meds or not. There's the RIFLE score for people with chronic kidney disease. There are so many that are incorporated in medicine, because, in medicine, we appreciate that unconscious biases can kill people, and that is exactly what happens. And that's why so much research has gone into developing clinically validated scores.

This morning, I heard a lot of rhetoric in this chamber around the integrated assessment tool that has been developed for aged care. Some senators from the coalition said that this has not been clinically validated. They questioned why we are using an algorithm on older Australians: how dare we do this! In fact, the integrated assessment tool was developed over a four- to five-year period, starting back in 2020 or thereabouts, because we found that, in the old system, when people were being dispensed home-care packages, there were people with very similar clinical, social, cognitive and physical characteristics who were getting widely different packages—widely different packages. In other words, it was highly variable, and there was inbuilt inequity in the old system, meaning that we were creating a country of haves and have-nots, by design, because we were relying on subjective assessments by flawed humans.

This is why the IAT was developed. It was originally prototyped in 2020. There were advisory groups—clinical, technical and statistical. In 2022, Flinders University ran a living lab trial—mock scenarios, with actors and clients. This is what we do in medical school, by the way; this is how we train doctors to become better doctors: we use mock scenarios. In 2023, there was a live trial in over 22,000 people, and it was clinically validated on them. Then the IAT was further clinically validated on a dataset of over 100,000 people. It turned out, from that, there's a classification tool, which determines your level of funding, and a prioritisation tool, which determines which level you get. And we have launched this.

We had a hearing where we found that, of the 180,000 assessments that had been done, 834—or 0.5 per cent—are now undergoing review, and only one, as of April of this year, has gone to the Administrative Review Tribunal. In other words, it's not perfect, but it's not bad at all. It's not bad at all, and it means that we are delivering more equitable aged care to more Australians without creating, by design, a series of haves and have-nots. We know there's more to do, and we are introducing further escalation protocols to improve this tool. (Time expired)

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

I asked some questions at Senate estimates a few weeks ago, and I was a little gobsmacked by the answers. I didn't ask those questions thinking there would be any major controversy; I was just reviewing the different loans, guarantees and other investments that a body called Export Finance Australia had made recently. I was a bit shocked to find out that a loan that Export Finance Australia had made to the Power Finance Corporation of India involved no Australian whatsoever. I thought perhaps there was some Australian business that was a co-investor or supplier or perhaps even a contractor working on this project. But, in fact, this investment that had been proudly announced by Export Finance Australia, the government's financing arm, that you taxpayers all pay for, on 30 September last year didn't involve any Australians except the poor taxpayers who have to pay for it. That's it.

This wasn't a small amount of money. This was a US$171 million investment. At current exchange rates, that's roughly A$250 million—a quarter of a billion Australian dollars—that has been provided to an Indian corporation that involves no Australians. Their corporation is installing solar panels in India to provide electricity to Indians. Now, I want to put on record that I love India—love it! I love the place. We've got a great relationship with them. I think we have a fantastic future trade and investment relationship with them. But I don't think a quarter of a billion Australian taxpayer dollars should be going to a corporation in India.

And it gets worse. This corporation is actually government owned! An Indian company that this government has thought fit to risk $250 million of your money with is government owned. It doesn't produce a single Australian job. It doesn't support a single Australian business. It's all just going to another country, hand over fist.

I don't think we build respect in our region when we act like this, when we act like mugs. They would just laugh at us. They would absolutely laugh at us. The Indian government would never do anything as stupid as this, as stupid as putting $250 million of their own money into another country, be it Australia or be it anywhere else. But we're mugs, absolute mugs; we're taken as suckers for doing things like this.

It gets worse. At the same estimates I asked, 'Well, why is it that Export Finance Australia has not helped a Mackay business, a North Queensland based business, who wanted to provide services to maintain trucks to coal mines in India?' This was an Australian business. It would have been an Australian export of mining services—a big growth industry for our country. It would have fitted the very purpose of Export Finance Australia—yes, admittedly, helping another country, but that's what we do with our exports, of course—but it was knocked back because, in the words of EFA, Export Finance Australia, it said, 'We might not be the right financier for them.' Why aren't they the right financier? It involves an Australian business. Why not? Well, guess what? It involves coal. That's why.

The government won't invest in anything that supports Australian industry and jobs if it involves the four-letter word 'coal'. But it's happy to hand over $250 million of your money to build solar panels, not made here in this country, to another nation's government. This is all because this government is obsessed with this absurdity of net zero emissions. It's putting that on a pillar above Australian jobs, above Australian industry, and it's now costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars at least.

Question agreed to.