Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hume for his question—question 4, as predicted. The member asks about interest rates. In a number of questions today, yesterday and in previous sitting weeks I have been asked about what happened, as if the circumstances changed completely from before the election to after the election. This is what his former leader said before the election: 'We know where these pressures are coming from. We know the pressures of rising costs of living, the pressures on interest rates are coming from not just the war in Ukraine, which has caused an energy price shock the likes of which we have not seen for many decades, but, secondly, the disruptions to supply chains that are coming from the pandemic. We are still feeling the effects of the rather extraordinary economic times that we are living in.' That was the member for Cook just before the election, less than a month before the election.

The member for Hume would have Australians watching this believe that it was all hunky dory, that there was no inflation and there were no supply chain issues until there was a change of government. But it's just not true, as he himself said as recently as last September, when he spoke about interest rates bucking decades of downward trends and spoke about the inflationary environment. He says one thing in here and a different thing—

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