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Is CPI Still Relevant for Everyday Australians?

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For those following my Senate Estimates posts, it’s become clear that the Albanese Government is ‘stage managing’ the Estimates process to the point where getting answers has become nearly impossible. In early August, I was pleased to secure a new type of inquiry to supplement estimate questions, which will allow the Senate to call a department or agency for a brief session to have specific question/s answered.

The first agency to be called will be the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). We’ll be asking how they compile the cost of living index, which is Australia’s official inflation index. This is a very important piece of data, as it decides wage increases for everyday Australians, interest rates, government bond yields and our exchange rate.

With many Australians questioning the accuracy of the official 3.8% inflation rate—feeling that inflation is actually worse—I am eager to get to the truth of what our inflation rate actually is.

Transcript

The actual rate of inflation—or, more accurately, the consumer price index—represents how much cost of living has changed in the previous quarter and over time. To measure the CPI change, the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses a basket of goods and services that should fairly represent the purchases an average Australian household would make. Incremental changes are made to the measure every few years to take into account changes in household spending patterns. After many years of adjustments, chops and changes, the question now arises: how relevant is the CPI calculation to the lives of working Australians? 

Mortgages have become a massive expense, rising 45 per cent across the 12 interest rate rises that have occurred under the Anthony Albanese Labor government, yet housing is only 13 per cent of the inflation basket for households, no matter how high your mortgage or rent goes. In part, this is because the spending pattern that sets the weightings is taken from 2022, before Labor’s inflation actually set in. The weighting in the basket given to holidays and recreation has increased to 12.1 per cent. This is interesting, because holidays were really expensive during COVID and then, as the economy reopened, the cost came back down. Increasing the weighting for holidays has acted to reduce the inflation rate artificially. How accurate is that? Who can afford expensive holidays in the current cost-of-living crisis?  

In creating a system that relies on spending patterns which may be years old or which fail to reflect the main demographic—working families—the ABS is failing to accurately reflect cost-of-living increases as households feel the pain right now. Governments can fudge the figures. Government subsidies on energy, for instance, reduce the inflation rate for energy, even though consumers are paying the full bill themselves either through their wages or through tax. Inflation should be expressed before government cover-up payments, not after. 

One Nation will return to this topic next week on behalf of Australian working families. 

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Australians Deserve Their Own Home

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Australians are sleeping on the street and the Government doesn’t care.

Hundreds of thousands of arrivals are flowing into the country while we don’t have houses for the Australians that are here. 

Rent prices are up 40% and house prices are 10x the average income, completely out of reach for most of Australians. We need to cut immigration, ban foreign ownership, give Australians more savings, introduce some competition to the banking cartel and open up construction as well. 

Australians deserve their own home, One Nation will make sure they get one.

Transcript

The housing and rent crisis is a national tragedy. In Australia, one of the richest countries in the world for resources, we have working families homeless, sleeping in their cars or under bridges. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It’s now $627, an increase of 40 per cent in just a few years. The national rental vacancy rate is just one per cent—actually slightly under that—far below the three per cent rate that’s considered a healthy market. House prices are out of control. In 1987, the average house cost 2.8 times the average income.

Today, a house costs 9.7 times the average income. This is why there are hardworking Australians sleeping on the street—families on the street. People under 30 have given up hope of ever owning a home, yet we oldies are meant to hand our young people a better life than we had. 

One Nation promises to fix this housing crisis for all Australians. We will make the tough decisions that the Liberal and Labor uniparty won’t. Two point eight million temporary visa holders are in the country today, up from 2.3 million pre COVID. That’s an additional 200,000 homes needed for these new arrivals. While Australians can’t afford roofs over their heads, we need some of these people on visas to leave. An Australian can’t buy a house in China, yet foreign investors can buy both new and existing houses here.

One Nation would ban all foreign ownership of residential housing. Australians must come first. We would allow people to use some superannuation to invest in their homes. After all, it’s your money. We will ditch Labor’s facade, its pathetic, bureaucratic Housing Australia programs. Instead, we’ll use the same funds to create cheap 30-year mortgages fixed at five per cent interest to get Australians into homes. 

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