Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

This is another way of asking the same question, and I can only give the same answer. The government understands the difficulties faced by the 35 per cent of Australian households who have owner-occupier mortgages and who will be paying—depending on their own circumstances and whether they have a fixed loan or a part fixed loan and on whether they extend the term of their loan—another one-quarter of a per cent on their home mortgage.

What Australian families in these situations want us to do as a government is to use the levers at our disposal to ensure that inflation remains as low as possible—and inflation is half the rate under our government that it was under the previous government—to ensure that real wages continue to rise, as they have under our government, and to continue to ensure that they have 30-year lows in unemployment so that they can maintain their role in the workforce and retain security of employment. These are the things that are critical to Australian families.

While I acknowledge that those families with mortgages will pay more as a result of this rate rise, they will have the comfort of knowing that mortgage rates, even at 8.05 per cent, are considerably lower than they were when we came into office, when they were at 10.5 per cent. On the average mortgage, people are paying much less than they would be paying if mortgage rates had stayed at 10.5 per cent.