Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week's monthly inflation rate was celebrated by many for showing that inflation is finally returning to the target band. After more than 18 months and 12 interest rate rises, the worst of this crisis might finally be over. But it is only over in a political sense. For millions of families around the country, prices are significantly higher than they were three years ago, and they will stay at those higher levels. Returning inflation to a target does not fix that. While the government likes to talk about wages growing faster than they have in a decade, the truth is that wages are not growing as fast as inflation and Australians are worse off in real terms.

This is borne out by yesterday's national accounts, which shows an economy where costs continue to rise faster than wages. It shows households have eaten through half the savings they held a year ago, which was already down on COVID levels. The pressure people are feeling is real, and lower inflation won't make it go away. Every day I hear stories from constituents who are struggling, whose lives are harder because of this crisis, and who are desperately trying to make ends meet. For them, the sense of celebration about falling inflation is frustrating, because the hardships aren't yet over for them. They feel that not enough has been done to support them, and they worry that the political interest in this issue will fade.

Some people are happy to dismiss the economic worries of Wentworth. They think of us as tech leaders and corporate executives in mansions and that our community can take care of itself. But Wentworth is not homogeneous. It is a rich and diverse community, where almost half of our residents are renters, where the majority are not in the top income quintiles and where some people are doing it really tough—just as they are in every single other electorate. It's a community where housing is unbelievably expensive, and those with mortgages have had to deal with the crushing hikes over the last 18 months.

We have enormous numbers of small businesses, including bRU Coffee Bondi, which is an absolute favourite for those of us who spend time in Bondi. I know the owner, Sondra, pretty well, and she is an absolutely outstanding businesswoman. She has won awards for her sustainability and the work she does. But she tells me about how hard it is to run a business right now and the challenges she faces in keeping things open and keeping her staff employed. Many of these businesses are like bRU; they're struggling, particularly as residents with soaring mortgages and rents have to cut back on their spending at local businesses. For anyone who hasn't been in this situation, it's difficult to explain how stressful it is to run a business in tough times. The weight of responsibility can be completely overwhelming—of course you want to keep the doors open, you want to keep your people employed, and you want to keep serving your community. But, for so many small businesses, it's also their only real financial asset. It's the way they earn their living and pay the mortgage, and it's their retirement plan.

A small business not only supports the owner's family but also supports the families of so many others. It supports every single employee, all of whom have put faith in that small-business person to keep their own families going. That's the burden of being a small-business owner. There is no magic bullet to solve these problems. There's nothing that I, as your local member, or this government can do that will make these challenges magically disappear or completely go away. But the work I'm doing on tax reform, housing, child care, climate and mental health, and in a host of other areas, is aimed at finding ways to ease the pressure and making it easier to build and grow businesses and grow real wages because that's what really counts. We can all work to ensure we don't prolong the pressure any more than is necessary or make it any worse than it needs to be. We can all work together to lay the foundations for a better, stronger, more resilient economy for the future.