Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday Australian households and small businesses received tough news from the Governor of the Reserve Bank, with a ninth consecutive interest rate increase. They have seen the cash rate now get up to 3.35 per cent. Of course, they are now, if they're on variable rates, paying far, far more than that. We know that 800,000 Australian households are going to be moving from fixed rates to those floating rates in the course of this year. Many small businesses are in the same boat. Sadly, the Prime Minister today failed to tell us how many, but we know a very large proportion of those businesses who have a loan will move from fixed rates to floating rates this year. For a typical family that has entered into a new mortgage of $750,000—and in south-western Sydney and, indeed, in my electorate you'll see much bigger mortgages than that—that means they will be making additional payments of $18,000 a year.

An opposition member: How much?

Eighteen thousand dollars a year. This is a very scary time for many of those households, because they entered into these mortgages expecting that they were going to be making payments substantially smaller than that. What they all know is that, in their household budgets, something has to give. Are they going to do more overtime, which will mean they won't be able to pick up the kids from school? Are they going to take another job, a second job, which will mean, again, less family time, less time with friends and loved ones? Are they going to have to drop their family holiday this year? These are tough decisions for Australian households, and decisions that they didn't anticipate having to make, but that is the reality of the situation that we have right now.

We haven't seen interest rates at this level since 2012. And in 2012 Labor was in government.

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