“Hurts working Australians”: Peter Dutton addressed cost-of-living in budget reply

Peter Dutton says a wave of migration will worsen Australia’s housing crisis and leave the nation’s battlers in its wake.

In his budget reply speech on Thursday, the opposition leader also said the coalition would ban betting ads during sports matches if it won the next election and commit $5 million to make treatment for conditions affecting women such as endometriosis more affordable.

Tellingly, though, Dutton said the nation was built on the success of its migrants but in a housing crisis it had to be managed.

“Families can’t find rental accommodation, you can’t buy a house at an auction, it’s tough,” he told Nine’s Today show on Friday.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the coalition’s position was the “height of hypocrisy” with the 2019 budget forecasting Australia’s population to hit 27 million.

“They were proposing that there be a bigger Australia than what we’ve faced now,” he said.

Marles said the coalition and Greens were teaming up to block policies such as the government’s $10 billion housing fund, which was aimed at alleviating the housing crunch.

While the opposition backed some budget measures such as tripling the bulk billing incentive and expanding single-parent payments, Dutton said families had received little support.

“The budget hurts working Australians. Worse, it risks creating a generation of working poor Australians,” he said on Thursday.

Opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume said the government had failed to tackle inflation.

“Unless you slay that dragon, well, essentially you’re not governing. You’re not doing your job,” she told ABC TV on Friday.

“If you’re governing for all Australians, you have to tackle the problem at the source not simply the symptoms. The only way to do that is to bring down inflation.”

Dutton said increasing overseas migration by 1.5 million people across the next five years would fuel a housing and rental crisis.

“Cities, towns and suburbs are already choked with congestion, yet in this budget — as it did in the last — the government is cutting infrastructure spending already announced,” he said.

He doubled down on claims families with children and a mortgage would be $25,000 worse off under the government and said power bills would still rise despite measures in the budget providing energy relief.

“Very few Australians can say they are better off today than they were 12 months ago when Labor was elected,” he said.

Senator Hume said the number of new migrants was not the prime concern, but how the system was managed.

“We’ve been built on the back of the migrant story and we want that to continue …  but if you don’t manage your migration intake, then it can actually do economic harm rather than good,” she said.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said Dutton’s address rehashed old ideas rejected by voters at the last election.

“He’s come back into the parliament with the same old ideas and the same old approach instead of trying to unify the country and make them feel confident about the future,” he said.

The budget contained $14.6 billion in cost-of-living relief measures, including a $40 a-week increase in welfare payments for those on JobSeeker — a measure the coalition will oppose.

Instead, Dutton said there should be an increase in the income-free threshold, arguing people would be able to earn more.

“The government has taken decisions — and avoided others — which has made inflation higher than it needs to be,” he said.

This article was first published by AAP.