MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator MULHOLLAND (Queensland) (17:08): Welcome to Bizarro World, where things are getting weirder and weirder by the day in here, where the opposition can come in to this place pretending to care about the cost of living, while spending the last election arguing against wage increases, pushing higher taxes and offering no cost-of-living relief measures for Australians.

This motion right here is confirmation that the Liberals are living in an alternative universe. Just yesterday, Senator Bragg was in this place, backing in the Greens motion that attacked home ownership for 190,000 Australians thanks to Labor's five per cent deposits. Senator Hume and the Liberals might have a short memory, but Australians do not.

We lived through that decade of Liberal inaction, under Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison, who pushed the Australian economy and household budgets to the brink. Of the many, many compelling reasons Australians had to vote Labor at the last election, top of the list was cost-of-living relief. I'm happy to outline some of those measures for Senator Hume now.

We committed to increasing the minimum wage. That's an extra 3.5 per cent from 1 July, or a total of $9,120 over the life of this government. We promised tax cuts while the Liberal and National parties wanted people to pay more.

We're offering a tax cut of $2,500 in 2026-27 and a further average tax cut of $2,500 in 2027-28. Our bulk-billing initiatives will start to flow from next week, giving more Australians access to a bulk-billing doctor. Already, 150 GP clinics in Queensland alone have indicated that they will convert to bulk-billing clinics from 1 November, thanks to Labor.

We're also opening additional urgent care clinics so that people can see a bulk-billing doctor. That's new bulk-billing clinics for Buderim, Caloundra, Deception Bay and Burpengary just to name a few. We've taken $150 off electricity bills.

We've wiped 20 per cent off HECS debts for students, saving an average of $5,000 to $6,000 per student. We're offering cheaper medicines, so you won't pay more than $25 per prescription. So, yes, it's true; we are focused on bringing down the cost of living.

But it is also true that life would have been infinitely more difficult right now if Australia were suffering beneath a Dutton Liberal-National regime, as Senator Hume knows because she was Dutton's shadow minister for finance and the architect of the Liberals' disastrous economic policies. So it's curious to me that, rather than reflecting on your role in the self-destruction of the Liberal Party, you instead come into this place attempting to rewrite history on the cost of living and the role you and the Liberal Party have played in it.

When Labor came into office, living standards in Australia were falling twice as fast as the OECD average. That's a freefall. But, thanks to the work of Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Labor has course-corrected the Australian economy away from the Liberals' mismanagement.

We delivered the first budget surplus in 15 years, and, according to the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, our deficit is almost half the $47.1 billion inherited from the Liberals. S&P Global Ratings reaffirmed Australia's AAA sovereign rating under Chalmers, and real wages have grown for seven consecutive quarters under Labor, up 0.3 per cent in the year to June 2024.

In fact, thanks to Labor's cost-of-living relief measures, Australian households are projected to have an extra $2,800 in disposable income on average this financial year alone. Just yesterday, I got a message from Chris, a single mother of three. She's been underpaid while working for a labour hire firm in a Central Queensland mine.

Thanks to Labor's same job, same pay policy, she will be receiving an extra $18 an hour effective immediately, and I'll quote her message. She said: This is the first time I've ever had a pay rise! Thanks to Labor, that $18 difference will mean $1,200 more for her in each pay cycle.