QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS – Answers to Questions

I notice my esteemed colleague Senator Bilyk mentioned the wages record of the previous coalition government, but she failed to mention the wages record under her own government, and probably for good reason. The reason for that is that real wages under this Labor government have declined at the fastest rate on record. That’s why people are struggling out there. Today, real wages are back to levels we haven’t seen since 2011. Under this government, under the Labor government, people’s standard of living in Australia has gone back more than a decade—that’s 13 years ago. Primarily that is because this government has let inflation getout of control, and it has done nothing to actively seek to rein it in. We still have some of the highest inflation rates in the world right now, and it would appear that the inflation dragon is rearing its head again in other countries. There are still many disruptions to supply chains, including the continuing situation near the Suez Canal. Oil prices are ticking up again. It is still very costly. Everyone can notice that at the petrol pump, and people’s energy bills in this country have not declined by $275, as the government promised. In that context, with all of these issues, when inflation is still high and when people’s real wages have been eroded back to what they were more than a decade ago, this government thinks the answer is to spend a week spending $6.75 billion. Over the past seven days this government has spent at a rate of almost a billion dollars a day. Where’s the justification for it? The government had no defence or justification in question time for why they have been pump priming this already overheated economy and potentially making inflation worse. There are things the government could do to help with inflation. They are difficult decisions and they require some degree of fortitude, but I want to highlight two fronts the government has almost completely lost control of at the moment that are making the inflation situation that much worse. Firstly, on migration, we learned in the last couple of weeks that during the last financial year Australia brought in 518,000 people in one year—Thank you, Senator Scarr. In net terms it was 518,000 people in one year. That’s just a bit more than the size of Canberra arriving in one year. When you see, in our major cities, people living in tents and
queues such as you would see at Dreamworld lined up in front of a standard rental house, the reason is that this government has lost control of the borders. It is their job to control who comes into this country. That’s the national and federal government’s job. They have no plan for how to house 518,000 new people. There’s no doubt that, when we were coming out of COVID, we had to open up our borders to let some people back in and bring skilled migrants in. But this government botched our recovery from COVID by simply opening the floodgates to whoever wanted to move to this country, with absolutely zero plan to ensure that those Australians who live here have houses and can survive with roofs over their heads. So many Australians now are unnecessarily
homeless because we’re taking in too many people. That’s adding to our inflationary environment, especially in housing and rents. The other situation is that the government has completely lost control of our energy markets. We’re going to find out this week what the energy price will be for the next year, the so-called ‘default market offer’. Almost certainly they won’t show a $275 reduction. This government promised when it came to power almost two years ago that it would lower electricity prices by $275. The Prime Minister promised that to the Australian people almost 100 times. Since then he hasn’t said ‘boo’ about it, because they haven’t delivered it. They’ll blame everyone for their problems. Apparently it’s our fault for proposing nuclear energy—and we’re just proposing it. That’s not going to change the real world unless we’re elected. They’re responsible because they’re the government, yet they can’t explain why their policies are not having the effect they did. They blame the Ukraine war and Vladimir Putin, but that started more than two years ago. We have enormous natural resources in this country. We never before had to rely on Russia for
energy security, but now we do under this Labor government, and that’s because they won’t tap our energy resources. If we want to get energy prices down, we have to use our natural resources.
If the government could just do those two things—control our borders and use our natural resources—a lot of these inflationary problems would come off the Australian people.