ADJOURNMENT

Senator LIDDLE (South Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (19:42): It's certainly been a cold winter, and it's made worse by Labor's cost-of-living crisis forcing families to choose between heating and eating and anything else. Labor has left many out in the cold. Their flawed policies have made little difference; in fact, they've made a bad situation worse.

The ending of the fuel excise relief just last week will not make it better, only worse. Of course, Labor's not looking and not listening, because when families are under pressure, the small businesses they rely on are under pressure too. Small businesses, which make up over 90 per cent of all businesses, are experiencing the same pain.

The local cafe is desperate to work out how they keep customers coming in and not passing on the costs. Retail shops are talking about increasing sales of low-margin goods, but less of the sales that keep their businesses viable. Tradies are finding just getting a job is getting harder, and the tools and the materials they use are more expensive.

All of that prevents businesses from putting on more staff, buying more equipment and increasing things in the workplace that actually improve productivity and safety and which benefit whole communities. People who create jobs actually contribute to communities too. When inflation is high, we need to remember that it's the poorest people that are impacted the most.

Sometimes when Labor is over there, telling us that they care about people who are vulnerable, they forget that it is the poorest people who are impacted the most. It's not here in Canberra nor on the union shop floor that you should develop policies—we see them, time and time again, taking instruction from their union masters—it is by listening and looking. Stop doing what does not work and do more of what does.

That makes a difference. We heard from job creators in so many industries—construction, finance and business—about the lack of trust between government and the people. Labor's most recent broken promise, which heralded in a raft of toxic taxes, has broken their confidence and belief even further.

Dishonest and delusional is how I describe Labor's narrative of the reality that Australians are feeling right now—not people in Canberra but people out there, outside of this house, living real lives. Regional communities are being hollowed out as a result of people paying less for meals and families drawing down on holiday spending—not spending so much. They are contributing less to the overall economy, and, as the economy shrinks, the bureaucracy is growing and the anxiety across families' kitchen tables every day is unmeasurable.

Every dollar that disappears from a household budget is a dollar that is not being spent in local businesses. You haven't increased real wages, because inflation is killing the poorest people and preventing them from enjoying what they should enjoy as Australians. When mortgages cost more than they should because inflation balloons beyond reason, that's on Labor.

Labor continues to squander opportunities by ignoring pleas from businesses and families and pushes ahead with building bureaucracy. That 2,000-page Construction Code doesn't pour a single slab of concrete or build a single home; it builds a mountain of red tape that drives costs through the roof, forcing builders to walk away and pushing homeownership out of reach.

Labor is standing at a crossroad, knowing exactly what path leads to disaster; yet, stubbornly, they keep marching down the same path anyway. They're not interested in solutions; they're just interested in staying on that same path, leaving Australians to clean up the mess. Take the instant asset write-off.

Labor talks about $20,000 and making it permanent. Well, when you actually talk to small businesses—that doesn't buy them a forklift. It doesn't buy them a pub combi oven or a conveyor dishwasher.

It doesn't build them a multilane check-out network. Those things easily cost much more than $20,000. If you just talk to people in business, they'll tell you it's not going to help them.

What they need is for you to stop spending, get inflation under control and stop pretending that you're not killing the economy, particularly for regional and remote communities that are doing it tougher because you cannot keep inflation under the bar that you committed to.