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

I move: That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notices asked by Opposition senators today. This week confirmed what Australians already know and fear from their weekly visits to the shops, and that is that Australians have yet to record a real wage increase since the election of the Labor government. Their real wages are down. They have gone backwards by a long way. In fact, real wages are back to levels that we haven’t seen since 2011. Real wages for Australians were last at this level more than 10 years ago, because the inflation rate under this term of the Labor government has been sitting far above what has been returned to Australians in wage increases. That’s why everyone is struggling. Senator Murray Watt, here in the chamber, laughs at that. Obviously, he doesn’t understand what Australians are facing. He doesn’t understand that Australians can’t afford their groceries right now. He doesn’t understand that Australians are struggling to pay their mortgage, and perhaps that explains the tin-eared response from this government to the legitimate issues facing Australian families. This government continues to put its head in the sand and think that there is no problem. Last week, we saw the Reserve Bank of Australia warn that the spending levels of governments are stopping them from cutting interest rates and helping Australian families to pay their mortgages. In fact, in their Statement on monetary policy, they explicitly said that the spending of federal and state governments is preventing them from changing or reducing interest rates. It was followed up by a press conference from the Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock where she repeated those issues. In response, we had these delusionary statements from the Treasurer, saying that there is not a problem, that federal spending growth has not contributed to the challenge of the Reserve Bank and has not contributed to inflation—which is clearly at odds with the statements of the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the person in charge of tackling inflation in this country. It is very easy to check the facts. We have here a government that continue to say that they actually slashed spending growth in their first two budgets—which is what the finance minister has been saying lately. Yet Commonwealth government spending in their last budget, delivered a few months ago, was in fact $64 billion higher
than when they came to government. That is hardly slashing spending. Some of that growth will be because unemployment is higher than expected and inflation is higher than expected and some government spending, like pensions, is linked to that. But there is a table you can go to in the budget which separates those issues out. It gets you the real answers about what this government has done to either detract from or contribute to spending pressures and therefore the inflationary pressures facing Australians. The table shows that, in their first full budget, in 2023-24, in net terms the government’s policy decisions—not the automatic changes that occur because of inflation and other issues—had added over $20 billion of spending to the annual budget. In her answer, the finance minister spoke about their savings, saying, ‘Oh, we’ve made savings.’ The same table, on page 93 of this year’s budget, shows that net, after their savings, they actually added an extra
$24 billion of spending in this year’s budget. So in two budgets, in just two years, there was $44 billion of extra spending in net terms, even after you factor in the government savings. That is a lot of money. In fact, it is the biggest increase in government spending for policy decisions since the days of Kevin Rudd, if you take out the COVID years. Obviously with COVID there was massive spending in response to lockdowns et cetera. This is the greatest level of government spending, outside of COVID, since Kevin Rudd faced the global financial crisis. The government has done that at a time of raging inflation here and around the world. Now the only thing getting made in Australia anymore is the government’s inflation. It is made here from their budgets and their spending, and
that is what is contributing to the pressures on Australians. Government ministers may laugh at the statistics that show that the standard living of Australians has fallen by more than a decade in just two years. We are back to a standard of living that people last experienced in 2011. That is the record of this government, and they are doing nothing about it.