Michael Sukkar MP

Matter of Public Importance: Cost of Living

After 20 months of a Labor government, it is sad to say that Australians are poorer. Australians are poorer after 20 months of a Labor government, and what we’ve just seen here—with a very self-satisfied Treasurer coming in here with his grin and a Prime Minister looking very happy with himself—is that clearly they are disconnected from the pain being felt by households throughout this country. It’s not often that, after nearly two years of a new government, anyone has been able to stand up and say that people in Australia are now poorer than they were when the Labor Party came to government.

The average household in this country has seen a loss of $8,000. That is the average household. It doesn’t include households with a mortgage, and we know that if you’ve got a mortgage it’s well above $20,000—$24,000, in fact, for an Australian family with an average mortgage. That’s how much they are worse off after two years of a Labor government. Food is up by nearly 10 per cent. Housing, with this hapless housing minister with no idea, is up by 12 per cent. Electricity is up by 20 per cent. Insurance is up by 22 per cent. It’ll be very interesting to see the next quarter’s ABS data as Australians start seeing their insurance notices coming through. And, of course, gas is up by 27 per cent.

Let’s touch on a couple of those. Electricity is up by 20 per cent and gas is up by 27 per cent, but this Prime Minister, whom the truth is not known to, said on 97 occasions before the election that energy prices for the average house would be down by $275 a year. He said it on 97 occasions. How many times has he said it since the election? He has not said it at all. He’s not dared repeat his promise that he made to the Australian people of a $275 reduction in power prices. We know that the truth is not something that the Prime Minister is particularly familiar with, particularly as we see his recent breaking of faith with the Australian people, but he did say before the election—and we saw the headlines—’Life will be easier under me.’ ‘Life will be easier under me,’ was the catch-cry from the Prime Minister. Does any Australian, other than perhaps a union official, believe that life is better for them after 20 months of a Labor government? The statistics prove that that is not the case.

We now have a huge admission—a massive admission—from the government of the disaster that has befallen the Australian community. Today we see a very belated—and only once they were forced into it—announcement of $14.4 million of additional funding for food relief agencies. We welcome that very belated commitment. But, if things are going so well in this country, as the Treasurer sits there with his supercilious smile and the Prime Minister laughs all through question time, why on earth are our food banks around the country busting at the seams? Every single person in this place knows that, in their own communities, our food banks are seeing families and individuals whom they have never seen before. They’re seeing people with full-time jobs. They’re seeing two-parent working families who are only able to make ends meet if they come to their food bank.

So, on one hand, if you look at the scoreboard and the results of 20 months of a Labor government, we’ve got food banks bursting at the seams—and we say thank you for this very belated and late-coming $14.4 million commitment. But, interestingly, on the same day that we see a $14.4 million commitment to food relief—which, let’s be frank, won’t even touch the sides for our food banks around the country—we see another commitment from this government, which highlights where its priorities are at. Last night in Senate estimates the finance minister confirmed that the government are going to spend $40 million advertising their broken promise on stage 3 tax cuts. That is $40 million for an advertising campaign and $14 million for our food banks busting at the seams around this country; $40 million for high-end political consultants and advertising agency types to put an advertising campaign and $14 million for food banks. That says everything you need to know about the modern Labor Party, everything you need to know about how disconnected they are from the communities in which we all serve.

On this side of the House we are the true representative of working and Middle Australia. We are the people who truly stand up for the people who those opposite have crushed over 20 months. It goes further. The people who are being crushed by this government, sadly, are anybody renting, anybody trying to save for a home, anybody, frankly, who is trying to put a roof over their head, and what do we have? We have a so-called housing minister who has no idea what she is doing and clearly does not have any sway within that caucus, because we have record low vacancy rates, we have housing approvals at lows we have not seen for 20 years, we have first home buyers at their lowest levels since the Gillard government and we have fewer homes being built than we can remember. At that time, with that suite of statistics, we saw the Labor government bring in 520,000 migrants in the last calendar year, with absolutely no idea where those people are going to live. So what do the government do? The government come out and says, ‘Well, we’re going to commit to a housing target of 1.2 million homes over the next five years, starting from 1 July this year’—so two years after we have been in government we will make a commitment.

What did we see this week? We saw the HIA, the MBA blow the lid on this 1.2 million homes. What did we hear? We heard the Labor government will only miss it by 400,000—only 400,000! That is 400,000 homes short, based on approval data that we have see today. So that is not missing it by ‘this much’. A 1.2 million home commitment is going to be missed by 400,000 and guess what happens during that same period? We ramp up migration—1.5 million migrants over five years. How on earth can you, in good conscience, bring in 1.5 million migrants with no idea of where they are going to live, which will drive up housing costs for Australian throughout this country?

We believe, on this side of the House, that Australia should never get to a point where young hardworking Australians do not have a realistic prospect of owning their own home. We know the government has waved the white flag. The government wants foreign corporates, foreign multinationals, owning our housing stock and how do we know that? Because they have just given a big tax cut through their build-to-rent tax cuts to foreign funds to own homes in Australia. It will be very ironic if we have given a tax cut to foreign corporates to build homes in Australia but seek to smash mum-and-dad investors by abolishing negative gearing. Let’s be frank, we know that is what they are going to do. Just as those opposite said on hundreds of occasions ‘we have no plans to change stage 3’, ‘we have not considered it’, ‘we have no plans’, ‘we have not modelled it,’ we will hear the same denials in coming months. We will hear the same denials from the Prime Minister. We will hear, ‘We have no plan to change negative gearing,’ from the Prime Minister. The irony will be that on the one hand we smash mum and dads who want to get a leg up, who want to build for their retirement and on the other hand we will give a tax cut to foreign corporates to own thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of homes in this country. The government have failed on every measure, and shame on them for walking into this chamber looking so satisfied with themselves while the people of this country, including the people in the gallery, are doing it so tough.

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