Page 3684 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 23 August 2011
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not tell the full story. Mr Smyth pointed to the fact that the CPI has been increasing in recent months, that the cost of things we need has been going up much faster than the cost of things we want. That is where the squeeze really hits—when your water bill goes up by 15 per cent, when your electricity has gone up by around 80 per cent over 10 years, when your rates have gone up 150 per cent in 10 years in Banks and 100 per cent in other suburbs.
CPI has not been 150 per cent over the last 10 years. CPI has been more around the 40 per cent mark. We are talking about several times the CPI increase. We have got a situation where rates, water, electricity, rents and petrol have been going up much faster than CPI. The things that people need to pay for—the absolute essentials of life: a roof over people’s heads, the ability to get around, the ability of people to feed themselves—have all been going up. The cost of health insurance has been going up. These are the essentials.
First the government need to recognise the problem. This government do not get it. They reject it; they say it is not an issue. Then they have a handout mentality. This is the Labor Party’s way both federally and locally. Federally they kill an industry and say, “We’ll give you a handout; we’ll give you some transitional assistance.” We saw it with live cattle. We see it now with carbon tax. Carbon tax, they acknowledge, is going to kill or severely hurt certain industries. They put a big tax on, but they will spit some of it back at you in handouts.
And that is what this government does. Instead of getting the policies right, instead of getting its spending under control, it says, “We’ll give some handouts.” Yes, we should be helping pensioners, we should be helping those who are unemployed and we should be helping low income earners with the cost of living. But I put it back to the government. Do they think that everyone who does not get a handout is rich? Do they not care about any of those people? It appears from all of their policies and all that they do that they do not.
Mr Barr interjecting—
MR SESELJA: Listen to the sensitivity on this issue. They have been caught short on cost of living, and the people in the suburbs know it. They know that this government does not care. They know that any time they hear Andrew Barr and they get a sense of disdain. They know that when they hear Katy Gallagher speak about cost of living and her best advice is “get rid of the Foxtel”. And the best advice we have from the Greens’ convenor is “get out of your car”—unlike her—“because that will fix things”. You will not be able to get around anymore. It might take you two hours to get to work now instead of half an hour, but just get out of your car; that will fix your cost of living pressures. And then we have it reduced to an academic exercise where the new position of Meredith Hunter and the Greens is that the cost of living is an interesting concept.
No; cost of living is not an interesting concept. Cost of living is a real issue—a real, serious issue—for tens of thousands of Canberra families. They have been written off by this government and its Greens partners. It has been assumed that they can just get by because they have got higher than average incomes. Their costs are higher than
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