PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (11:40): As Australians go to work today on this Monday, hopefully having had a good weekend—taking kids to sport—many families are wondering how they are going to get from Monday to their next paycheque on Thursday. They've had a good weekend with the kids—they might have taken them to a movie or done some fun things—but there's now always more week at the end of the money.

Australians are doing it tougher than I have ever seen before. I was an apprentice carpenter when Australia was last in recession—this was in the 1980s; Mr Deputy Speaker Georganas, you're old enough to remember this. I would have been in my late teens, experiencing the hardships that so many people have not experienced today.

In fact, if you are under 50 you have not lived through a recession in Australia. Chris Uhlmann wrote a very good piece in the Australian yesterday, and I would encourage all my colleagues on all sides of the political fence, and anybody who may be listening to this—particularly those tradesmen who may be working on Australian building sites and listening to parliament, as I often used to do; believe it or not, there are many—to read it.

Chris Uhlmann wrote about the state of Australia and compared us to Argentina—about how you could not have manufactured if you had tried such a decline in Australian living standards as this government has overseen. We have seen the sharpest decline in living standards of all the OECD countries. Australian men and women are working harder now than ever before.

There was a report out last week that showed a significant increase in Australians who are now having to work two or three jobs just to pay their bills. We've seen 15 interest rate rises under this government, and we are tipped, economists say, in this cycle to see another four interest rate rises. Rents are on their way up—in fact, we've seen a trifecta of housing failure from this government: rents are up, prices are down and confidence is smashed.

This morning I was talking to one of my colleagues from the Gold Coast, who was telling me that one of the agencies in his electorate on the Gold Coast has not sold a single property in the month of September. I was talking to a real estate agent in my electorate recently, and she was telling me that their agency had not sold a property since the budget was handed down.

But we have a plan to fix the economy and to protect our way of life. The coalition is absolutely committed to overturning the disastrous path that this government has put us on. We will ensure that we get Australia back to where it was, with clean, affordable energy.

We will do that. We will cut the bureaucratic red tape that this government has lumped on, one piece of legislation at a time, and we will fix our economy by restoring confidence in our housing sector that this government has continued to smash time and time and time again. (Time expired)