This is the most pressing and important issue facing the country today. When I travelled around during the election and since, the most important issue facing Australians is the crushing increases in living costs that have occurred over the past year. We’ve obviously seen, this week, interest rates going up further. That is making it very tough for those homeowners seeking to pay back their mortgages. And we’ve seen electricity prices go through the roof in the last few months, although most of that hasn’t yet flowed through to people’s power bills. That will hit their fridge magnets later this year.
It is very tough for Australians. We’ve seen stories of people having to bring charcoal barbecues into their houses to heat their homes and ending up in hospital from carbon monoxide poisoning. I’ve heard stories of families living in their cars because they can’t afford the rent. There has to be action here to bring down the nation’s living costs. When the Albanese government was elected, I and all of us in Australia—I’m sure those Australians who voted for them—thought they had a plan to bring down the costs of living.
They were loudly and proudly saying: ‘I’m going to bring down your electricity bills. I’m going to help you with your living costs.’ Anthony Albanese, the now Prime Minister, said many times on the election trail that he was going to slash people’s power bills by $275 a year. Indeed, there was a bit of scepticism on whether he would be able to deliver that. It was such a very bold and very precise promise, $275 a year. He was very confident about it. The media did question him on it. They asked, ‘How do you know that?’ He said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to deliver it; I know I’m going to deliver it.’ He said that. He proudly put that on his Facebook page. You can go back and have a look on Anthony Albanese’s Facebook page. He put up a post saying, ‘I know that I’m going to save all Australians $275 a year off their electricity bills.’ Well, we learnt just weeks after the election that the Labor Party had dumped that promise, and they won’t repeat it ever again. They’re not mentioning that figure. There is no mention of $275. In the Governor-General’s address last week, instead of $275, the Labor Party made the Governor-General say that it will save families hundreds of dollars a year, a very vague, non-committal type promise which belies what they actually told the Australian people to get elected. As I said, that was the most important issue for people.
It’s very tough right now for families on fixed incomes. They thought they were electing a government, a party, the Labor Party, to help them deal with these issues, but all they’ve got since is blame and distraction. It would be much better if the newly elected government came up with a plan to help people’s living costs, came up with a clear idea about what they want to do, but we have seen through question time in these first two weeks that all they have done is sought to tarnish those who came before them. They have sought to blame everything that’s going on in this country on a government that’s no longer in power. That is their only plan, their only response, seemingly.
To be fair, there has been the odd mention of child care. We are apparently going to see legislation to help people with childcare expenses later this year. What the Labor Party don’t say is that those childcare benefits, which they’re apparently bringing forward in the coming months, are massively skewed to high-income earners. Indeed, modelling from the Department of Education showed that for two families, one on $360,000 a year and the other on $70,000 a year, the family on $70,000 a year would have 85 per cent fewer benefits than the family on $360,000 a year. The Australians listening to this would be gobsmacked that they have elected a so-called Labor Party that is providing massively more benefits to a family on $360,000 a year. Good luck to the family on $360,000, but I don’t think they need taxpayers’ money to help them bring up their children. The family on $70,000 deserve it, but they’re not getting much from the Labor Party. They’re hardly getting anything.
The modern Labor Party has become the party of the rich, the elite, the well educated and the well connected, not those of the working classes, who are suffering in this country right now. They deserve to have a voice in this place. They deserve to live in a country that’s blessed with energy resources and to have cheap energy. Why can’t we give people cheap energy in this country? We’ve got coal, we’ve got gas and we’ve got uranium. The other day, when the Treasurer was pushed on this, he blamed Vladimir Putin. He said your energy bills are going up because of Vladimir Putin. Hang on—in a country that has the best black coal in the world, is the largest liquefied-natural-gas exporter in the world and has the largest uranium reserves in the world, how come Vladimir Putin stops us from getting cheap energy? I don’t think it’s Vladimir Putin that’s stopping coal and gas companies from getting ahead. I don’t think it’s Vladimir Putin that’s putting forward radical climate legislation in this place that’s going to push up people’s power bills.
It’s about time this government gets back to basics and helps people with their budgets and their cost of living rather than focusing on these trinkets, which will do nothing to help out average Australians.
