Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Minchin, the Minister representing the Prime Minister. Has the minister seen the report in today’s Daily Telegraph headed ‘Don’t promise what you can’t deliver’, where Mrs Lyndal Spooner of Northmead in Western Sydney says that she wants the Prime Minister to stop promising to keep interest rates low? Isn’t Mrs Spooner, like so many other working Australians, sick of the government’s broken promises—promises like its claim that it would ‘keep interest rates at record lows’? Aren’t working families like that of Mrs Spooner already paying an additional $400 a month compared to what they were paying before the first of the nine consecutive interest rate increases under the Howard government? Could the minister tell us what his advice is to working families—families like that of Mrs Spooner—who will now be hit with another increase in mortgage repayments on top of rising fuel costs, rising childcare costs and rising grocery costs?