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

Labor was in government. You always pay more under Labor. Back in 2012 and early 2013, we saw high interest rates, and then, for nine years, we saw lower interest rates. Then, right on cue, Labor is back, and interest rates go up.

Government members interjecting—

They're over there looking for all the excuses. There are all the excuses, but the reality is: this is what happens, and it happens every time.

We know that the Reserve Bank is independent and it has to make independent decisions, although we did have the member for Whitlam out jawboning the Reserve Bank, telling them what to do. But the terrible news—and this is terrible news for Australian households—is that the governor told us yesterday, in his statement, that multiple rises are yet to come. Despite the jawboning from the member for Whitlam, multiple rises are yet to come. If you look at the bond market, which prices mortgage rates, as of yesterday afternoon it is expected that the cash rate will go to 3.9 per cent in July this year. That's where the market is at, and any amount of jawboning from the government is not going to change that being where the market is.

You would have thought, given those circumstances, given the pain that Australians are feeling, that this would be a priority for the government. You would have thought that. Australian households are hurting. It's not just households who have got a mortgage; it's also all those aspirational renters out there. When we look amongst the suburbs and towns in our electorates, we see family after family, Australian after Australian, who want to buy a house, but, when interest rates are going like that, they simply can't do it. On top of that, we know small businesses have had to borrow to get through COVID. They borrowed to build their businesses, to employ people and to invest in the equipment that they need. They too are feeling the pain of these rising interest rates, and they want to see a government that cares, a government that makes this a top priority.

Well, what have we seen in recent weeks? We've seen a prime minister who does press conferences where he wants to talk about anything except the cost of living and rising interest rates. He'll talk about anything, except he doesn't want to make the top priority—the first thing he leads out with—in his press conferences the real pain that Australians are feeling. He doesn't want to talk about that.

But it gets worse than that. That's bad, but it gets worse, because we have a treasurer who spent the summer writing a 6,000-word ideological essay. You know, Australians want the priority of the government to be their priorities, not the remaking of capitalism, not a 6,000-word ideological essay—and it's had a lot of reviews. I think the biggest and most important review is the review from the Australian people who say, 'We care about the rising cost of living and rising interest rates.'

But there have been other reviews, and I want to talk about a couple of them. The economist Steven Hamilton called the essay 'an incoherent assortment of kumbaya capitalist thought bubbles'. That is not what Australians need when they're facing serious cost-of-living pressures. That was after having written:

I don't recall ever having read so many words—almost 6000—that contained so little. No clear proposition, no coherent framework for thinking about the world, no tangible plan of action.

Well, Australians want a tangible plan of action.

In the AFR editorial in 29 January we read that the Treasurer's essay 'harks back to an essentially old model of more government intervention and higher taxes'. We know that's what's coming. At a time when making ends meet is a top priority for the Australian people, we have a government that we know is working out how to tax them more. The AFR reported that an Australian business leader said that the idea of rewriting the rules of capitalism is absolutely preposterous.

Now, this is another one. Crikey—I don't normally read it—gave this assessment:

The treasurer's unimpressive essay is an announcement of a strategy of political control as much as it is of economic planning.

Adam Creighton, in the Australian, said:

The Treasurer's rambling missive, where it is coherent—

I struggled with that bit—

is excessively gloomy and wrongly blames economic problems on the non-existent bogeyman of "neoliberalism" …

We've heard from many industry groups on this as well. Ai Group's Innes Willox warned against sleepwalking into being a quasi-command economy. Simon Crean, the former Labor Party leader, who was trying to be gentle—he was on his side, of course—said: 'It hasn't got a lot of details.'

The reality is that this government has done all the wrong things to put downward pressure on interest rates and inflation. We do have an independent Reserve Bank, but much of what the government does affects what the Reserve Bank does. There are three things in particular that I've seen them do that are just extraordinary in this context of the rising cost of living and rising interest rates.

The first is an industrial relations initiative which is only going to exacerbate the price-wage spiral. We all want to see higher real wages. Everyone in this parliament wants to see higher real wages—of course we do—but what we don't need is more inflation that reduces real wages. That's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see a toxic industrial relations environment. I'm old enough to have lived through the last time we had that, and there were sensible people on the other side of the chamber, in Labor, who saw the need to move towards a more enterprise driven industrial relations environment, and that meant moving away from industrywide bargaining.

Second, we've seen a ham-fisted energy policy where they themselves have refused to recommit to the goal they set before the last election of reducing electricity prices. They know they've got to give up on that. They know that they are driving up electricity prices, and that is only going to make inflation worse.

Thirdly, we've got a government who, for the first time since the Charter of Budget Honesty came into place, have dropped, explicitly, the goal of a balanced budget. They've dropped it. It's gone. Even Wayne Swan had that goal, but not the current treasurer. This government has not made the cost of living and putting downward pressure on interest rates a priority. (Time expired)

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