Shadow Portfolio — 31 March 2026

The Member for Cook, Mr Simon Kennedy, used two days of House debate to prosecute a sustained argument that the government's fiscal settings have left Australian households and industries structurally exposed to external shocks — and that the Coalition's advocacy, not government initiative, is driving the policy responses now appearing before the chamber.

The fuel excise debate is the sharpest expression of this line. Mr Kennedy supported the Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief) Bill 2026 but made clear the Coalition regards itself as the bill's author in political terms, arguing the government responded to coalition calls for fuel excise and road user charge cuts made over a week prior [TA-260331-house-66782c600be9:s053].

His support was conditional in tone: he criticised the government for failing to offset the measure in the budget, warning that unfinanced spending would stoke inflation and trigger further Reserve Bank interest rate rises, leaving households more exposed than before the relief was delivered [TA-260331-house-66782c600be9:s053]. The structural critique went further.

Mr Kennedy identified energy costs — fuel, diesel, electricity and gas — as foundational to manufacturing competitiveness, and cited the bankruptcies of Whyalla Steelworks, Nyrstar and Mount Isa smelter as evidence that the government's energy settings are destroying Australia's industrial base [TA-260331-house-66782c600be9:s053]. He characterised the government's response to the fuel crisis as a three-week arc from denial to crisis acknowledgment — a framing designed to establish that the government is reactive rather than governing.

His macro-economic positioning argument — that Australia entered the fuel crisis weaker than peer economies after four years of inflation above the Reserve Bank's 2.5 per cent target and government spending at a 40-year high outside the pandemic — directly connects the immediate fuel relief debate to a broader indictment of Labor's economic management [TA-260331-house-66782c600be9:s053].

The cost-of-living thread ran through the preceding sitting day's contributions as well. Mr Kennedy cited St Vincent de Paul correspondence from his electorate documenting rising demand for food, utility and emergency financial assistance, and pointed to the record of over 760,000 Australians aged 65 and over now in the workforce as evidence that fiscal and monetary settings are forcing older Australians to delay retirement [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s206].

The 14 interest rate rises figure recurred as an anchor claim, connecting banking regulation, inflation, and housing affordability into a single diagnosis of government failure [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s206].

On banking, Mr Kennedy endorsed the bipartisan banking inquiry and argued that regulatory settings remain too risk-focused relative to growth, that small business lending has been largely flat for a decade, and that low deposit housing schemes — including the five per cent deposit pathway — risk inflating prices and loading households with larger debt [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s089].

The critique of the five per cent deposit scheme is notable: it positions the Coalition as willing to question a politically popular housing access measure on structural grounds, linking the housing debate back to the core inflation and interest rate narrative.

The High Seas Biodiversity Bill segment offers a different register. Mr Kennedy announced Coalition support for the bill but used the opportunity to frame Labor as a laggard on international environmental commitments, noting Australia was among the last of almost 85 countries to ratify the treaty despite the Coalition's consistent bipartisan support throughout [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s099].

He grounded the Coalition's position in a catalogue of historical marine conservation achievements — the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the first national oceans policy, the Great Australian Bight Marine Park — while gently flagging scepticism that the government's 30-per-cent marine protection target by 2030 would be matched by delivery [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s099].

This is a recurring Coalition rhetorical pattern: bipartisan support paired with a delivery-scepticism rider that reserves the right to attack the government on implementation without opposing the policy.

Taken together, Mr Kennedy's activity across both days follows a coherent strategy: accept or endorse government bills where political cost of opposition is high, but claim credit for driving them, attach fiscal-responsibility conditions to support, and embed each debate within a macro-economic narrative in which Labor's spending and regulatory settings are the root cause of household and industrial vulnerability.