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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-04-03 Daily Xml
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Cost of Living Support

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (14:45): My question is to the Treasurer. Can the Treasurer update the house on measures undertaken to help South Australians with cost-of-living pressures?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Police) (14:45): I thank the member for Badcoe for this important question because, no doubt, South Australians have been doing it tough in recent years with the cost-of-living pressures that the entire nation has been under and also here in our state.

When Labor state and federal governments were elected at the beginning of 2022, inflation was already rampant. More than half a trillion dollars of fiscal and monetary stimulus had been deployed in 2020 and 2021. The Reserve Bank said that at March 2022 inflation was already running at more than 5 per cent per annum. Of course, it only continued to accelerate during the course of that year.

Even before Australians headed to the polls in May 2022, the Reserve Bank started increasing interest rates to try to get this rampant inflation under control. It has led to questions, particularly in the current context of a federal election, of: who is better placed to look after South Australians and Australians with these cost-of-living pressures? It is abundantly clear whose record stands clearly head and shoulders above others.

The Malinauskas Labor government has delivered nearly $830 million of cost-of-living supports for South Australians across three budgets, whether it has been pairing with the federal government to reduce energy bills: more than $130 million out of the state budget to support one in every two households, or 86,000 small businesses supporting a rebate.

Hospital car parking has been made cheaper. We have extended free public transport for seniors and Health Care Card holders. We have provided additional cost-of-living concession payments last year and we have increased the Cost of Living Concession. We have doubled it for those renting their properties. We have increased the sports vouchers scheme and we have increased the discount on the school materials and services charges. We have also worked incredibly hard to open up more housing, particularly affordable housing and public housing, for those South Australians most in need.

We have also made sure that those hardworking South Australians most in need of a pay rise get a decent pay rise. When we came to government, ambulance officers had not received a pay rise for five years under the previous government. Not only did we give them a pay rise for that five years but we also gave them a pay rise for the forward years as well. We have done the same thing with nurses and we have done the same thing with police officers.

It is not just us who have been supporting South Australians because the federal government has also been supporting Australians and South Australians with the cost of living: retargeting the stage 3 tax cuts to make sure that all workers benefit from a tax cut in the stage 3 tax cuts. Then, again, introducing new tax cuts in last week's budget. They have made medicines cheaper. They are expanding bulk-billing, making it cheaper to go to the doctor, and making sure that more Australians get access to energy bill relief.

They have cut student debts by 20 per cent, making sure that when graduates hit the workforce they have less of a burden on them. They have raised real wages for some of our lowest paid workers in the economy. Of course, there is no bogus Robodebt scheme, charging Australians for fake debts and even driving them to suicide. These are the actions of Labor governments supporting their communities. Of course, we know those opposite went to the last election promising to do nothing about the cost of living.

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