COST OF LIVING
There is no "silver bullet" to reducing the cost of living. No change can make an immediate difference.
However, some small steps can be taken as a starting point, with other measures to follow.
I call for the current tax-free threshold of $18,200 per annum to be raised to $26,000 per annum - therefore raising it from $350 per week to $500 per week. While it will not help society's poorest people, it will help countless people, such as part-time workers, who are hardly wealthy.
Tackling the cost of housing requires more than simply building more new homes. We have lots of unused homes and other dwellings, and we need to tap into these, so as to generate more supply and accessibility of affordable homes. As well as repurposing unused spaces, we need to ban foreign ownership of property and crack down on speculative investment which results in homes being left empty.
To lower the cost of electricity bills, we need a nationwide gas reservation policy. We should not export gas until we have satisfied our own needs, but the absence of a reservation policy has resulted in high domestic gas prices, while gas corporations make enormous profits at the same time. We also need more investment in batteries to store energy from solar panels, which Australians have embraced, as the growth in rooftop solar on homes shows. And to increase energy supply, we should be putting solar panels on large urban spaces, such as outdoor parking lots at major shopping centres - instead of shoving them onto farms.
The cost of healthcare requires greater investment in general practice. It will not ensure that every doctor can afford to bulk-bill, but it would increase the number of doctors finding it affordable to do so. Every extra dollar being spent here will reduce costs in other areas of the health system - including many unnecessary visits to public hospitals.
Lowering grocery prices, and the cost of other essentials, might be tricky. There appears to be no obvious way to bring more "competition" into those markets. However, I care about collaborating with others to find practical ways to reduce the cost of living.