STATE BUDGET — COST-OF-LIVING INCREASES
224. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Premier:
I am not sitting down this time!
I
refer to reports that demand for Foodbank services has more than doubled since
2020, with daily average customer numbers
in Bunbury alone jumping from 20 to nearly 80, despite our state's
financial position. How is it that in a state as wealthy as Western Australia,
with an eye-watering budget surplus, we have so many families struggling to
make ends meet in not only Perth city, but also our regions?
Mr M.
McGOWAN replied:
That was a very broad question.
Obviously, when you are in government, you do lots of things. We have taken the
stance in our time in office that we had to concentrate on getting Western Australians
back to work, and that is what we have done. We have created over 150 000 new
jobs in Western Australia during our time in office, despite going through a global
pandemic that floored economies all over the world. We have been the only
mainland state that did not go into recession over the course of the pandemic.
At the same time, because we managed to keep COVID out and because we put in
place, admittedly, reforms that had been talked about forever and never been
put in place, we managed to diversify the economy and ensure that far more Western
Australians have an array of jobs and opportunities than they did before. We
then put in place measures to ensure that more Western Australians could get
trained more affordably than ever before. We reversed many of the massive cost
increases for Western Australians to go and get trained that members opposite
had put in place. The cost of some courses went down by 72 per cent over our time in office, which has meant that a surge
of young Western Australians in particular, but also mature age
students, took the opportunity to go and get trained over this period.
Then,
as a consequence of our good financial management, we have invested in numerous
things. The public housing package that we announced last year was the biggest
investment in public housing ever seen in Western Australia. We put that
in place last year. We put a package in place to ensure that private owners who
wanted to go and own their own house could do so. We put that in place. We then
ensured, over COVID in particular, that we put in place a whole range of
measures to fund some of those not-for-profit organisations that help people in
need. I even went and met with the Lotteries Commission and asked it to totally
reorient its operations to support organisations like the one the member
mentioned and to make sure they had enough resources to support people over
this period.
We
then come to the cost-of-living pressures. We put up fees and charges by less
than half of what members opposite did in office over similar periods of
time. As the Minister for Energy said a minute ago, in some years the previous
government put up the price of electricity by 25 per cent for ordinary
families. We put in place a $600 credit on people's electricity bills
and opposition members attacked it and said they did not support it. They then
had the temerity and the hide to come in
here and complain about it and say that they now support it. I am actually not
sure whether members opposite support it or not. I do not think much of what
they say makes sense. I do not know whether members opposite support it, but
all those things we put in place over this period were to support Western Australians.
It is true that we have also focused on proper financial
management, which the opposition did not do in office and it was unsustainable. The opposition had us
heading to $44 billion worth of debt off a $5 billion base when it arrived
in office, and somehow it thought that was a good thing—loading up the
debt, losing the credit rating, increasing the interest payments.
What Western Australia needs and has
is a government that not only focuses on keeping the state strong, but also has
a strong stream of fairness running through it, which is exactly what we do.
All those things I just mentioned are in a strong stream of fairness so that Western
Australians can have opportunities they could not have before. That is what we
will do and what we continue to do. As the Minister for Community Services will
tell members, we have actually increased the
base funding for many of the not-for-profit organisations out there that
support people across the community to ensure that they have ongoing
funding to provide all those services. Our time in office has been punctuated
by good financial management, job creation and a whole range of social, health
and other programs that have helped families, and, at the same time, we are
keeping a real focus on cost-of-living pressures.