James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a really tough time for families in this country right now. Real wages are going backwards at the greatest rate for many decades. The December CPI was 7.8 per cent; the wages growth for the same period, annualised, was 3.3. So, if you're earning money and spending money, your real wealth is deteriorating dramatically right now under this government. It's the worst, as I say, it has been for many decades. And, regrettably, it is only going to get worse into the future.

The evidence for that is most simply seen by looking at the Labor Party's own budget, which they handed down last October and said that electricity prices over two years would be going up by 56 per cent and natural gas by more than 40 per cent.

The previous speaker has got a new talking point now, 'taking the sting out of the tail'. Apparently, we should be grateful that electricity prices are only going up by more than 20 per cent in my home state of South Australia—we should be grateful for that! It could have been even worse. And apparently that's something for the people of Australia to lay down and praise the government for—a government that said it was going to reduce electricity prices by $275 a year for the average household bill. Now we should be grateful that the sting is out of the tail and that this year they're only going to be going up, in my home state of South Australia, by more than 20 per cent!

Interest rates, of course, are climbing dramatically. We know that the Reserve Bank meets next week. We hope, for the families of this nation, that we see a pause in interest rates increasing. But, regrettably, there is a chance that they will go up again. Since the last meeting of the Reserve Bank of Australia, of course the US Fed has again increased interest rates; the Bank of England has again increased interest rates; the European Central Bank has again increased interest rates, as have the Norwegian central bank and Sweden's central bank. Regrettably, we are seeing that countries that have already had the peak of their inflation well before ours—which I sincerely hope was, in fact, in December—are still increasing interest rates. In the United States, their cash rate is dramatically higher than ours and, as I say, has increased again since the last meeting.

So there is this real spectre of interest rates continuing to go up further. But, even if they don't—even if they stay where they are—this is going to have a brutal impact on all those mortgage holders who are coming off fixed rates, of which we know there are 800,000 this year.

Even though we care for the plight of people who are struggling to get in to the property market, the people at the greatest disadvantage right now are those who locked in an interest rate when the cash rate was at 0.1 per cent, who are going to have that mortgage mature and are going to be refinanced and see their average mortgage repayments, already, if interest rates don't go up any further, more than doubling. The impact of that on the household budget, where your mortgage is, of course, your biggest cost, is going to be extreme and dramatic. People will be cancelling family holidays. They will have to reconsider whether they can meet some of the education expenses that they've got if they send their children to private school. Maybe it's too difficult to afford private health insurance going forward. They will certainly not be going to the local cafe or the local pub as much for a family outing because costs are going up so dramatically.

At the same time, real wages are decreasing, so the amount of money you've got in your pocket relative to the costs in your household budget is going backwards, and that was in the December quarter. The war in Ukraine and other things have obviously had an impact, but, when I consult the oil price today, it's at $75 a barrel, so the oil price is now lower than it's been for the last five years. Of course, that's in nominal terms, not in real terms. So, when you adjust that for inflation, oil prices at the moment are lower than they've ever been. So one of the main purported issues caused by war overseas would surely be higher oil prices, yet they are at an all-time low right now. It is just not acceptable to blame overseas forces. They are, frankly, not at play.

What is at play is that we have a government that is not taking this cost-of-living challenge seriously and is not making the decisions that are within their power to give real and significant relief to that crisis that families are struggling with. They were told that, if they voted Labor, power bills would come down and all of these challenges would not exist. Regrettably, for those Australians who are good-natured people and believed those promises, the complete opposite has occurred, and all the significant elements of the household budget are increasing at a rate that is completely out of control. We, obviously, call upon the government to take this seriously, to do something meaningful and to honour their election promises. If you can't do that, at least come clean with people and admit that, under this government, we are going to continue to see this cost-of-living crisis spiral out of control.

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