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

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, how much higher is the cash rate today compared to when you came into government? How much more are Australians paying on a typical mortgage as a result?

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

The cash rate today is 1.35. What we know is that, prior to the election, the Reserve Bank foreshadowed interest rate increases. If those opposite want to argue that, if the government had not changed, if the Australian people had not voted for change on 21 May, interest rates would be the same, then they are just kidding themselves.

We know that tomorrow the Reserve Bank will meet and is likely to make another decision. We'll wait and see what that independent decision is. I do note that, less than one month into the election—this perhaps summarises the attitude of those opposite and where these questions derive from—they said, 'Quite frankly, the Labor government has had nine years in opposition to prepare for the day that it would be in government, so there's no excuse.'

They spent nine years in office. They won't take responsibility for anything that they left: the trillion dollars of debt or any of the other chaos that they left in the economy; the failure on social policy; the failure on energy policy; or the failure on environmental policy. They won't take responsibility for their failure on transparency, whereby, as we've seen, they hid the energy prices.