QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator BLYTH (South Australia) (15:21): I'm going to pick up a little bit from what Senator Grogan was just talking about. I, too, am a very proud South Australian, but the reality is: you can make all of the housing announcements you like. You can announce 17,000 homes, but they still need to be built.

They still need to be delivered. This Labor government is falling short on delivering for the Australian people. We have inflation in Australia out of control, and it has been for 36 months.

We've got inflation that continues to rise, and real wages are not keeping pace. What that means is that people are working harder and they are keeping far less of what they earn. In reality, their wages are not just stagnant but actually going backwards.

That is unacceptable in a country like Australia. The crazy thing is, this is all by design. The Labor government has designed the policies that are doing this in the Australian economy.

Today, in question time, I was asking questions about productivity, and the Labor government could not point to a single year where we've seen productivity grow under their government over the last four years—not one single year. That is an indictment on this government. They're not taking responsibility and saying: 'Maybe we've got some of these plans wrong.

Maybe what we're doing is not achieving what we believe or what we intend it to achieve.' No—instead of doing that, we hear from Minister Wong, saying that we need to put up or shut up. We, as opposition, need to put up or shut up. I would say to Minister Wong: we will happily take over government.

I think the Australian people are fast coming to the conclusion that this government is failing them and that you cannot believe a single word of what this government tells the Australian people. This government is constantly making up mistruths and telling the Australian people that everything is fine, that wages have never been so high, that Australians have never had it so good.

All you have to do is walk out of this building and go and talk to real Australians. Real Australians are trying to keep their businesses afloat. Real Australian business owners, rather than employing more people—because they can't afford it—aren't taking salaries, because their electricity bills have gone up so much under this Labor government.

The transport costs for getting things into their restaurants, into their bakeries, into their businesses have also gone up, and then they've got to pay their staff higher wages. This is pushing businesses to the absolute breaking point, yet this government continues to tell them that they've never had it so good. It's never been so good under this Labor government.

I think the Australian people are—rightly—calling them out on that. They aren't feeling it. They are feeling poorer.

They are feeling as though they are working harder—and that is because they are. We've got families who cannot balance the household budget under this Labor government, and this government keeps saying, 'We've announced all of these houses.' The announcements are the really easy thing to do in government. It is very easy to go out and make an announcement; it's very difficult to actually deliver.

We've got a whole lot of young people in Australia now who have negative equity in their homes because of this government's five per cent deposit scheme. These are young Australians who now owe more than what their housing asset is worth. They should never have been put in that position by this government.

Things are going terribly, terribly wrong, and I say to them, 'It's time; Australians need a change.' (Time expired) Question agreed to.