Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Twelve! So your tax cut has already been wiped out by this government in decimating your standard of living through the increased costs you are paying on your mortgage, at the grocery store, on your electricity bills and at the petrol station. This Labor inflation is a cancer on the standard of living in this country. It is Labor's inflation. They tried to pretend for months and months that this was caused by international pressures, but now it is very clear that this is Labor's homegrown inflation. Just one interest rate rise will wipe out the benefits of this tax cut because Labor cannot control their budget. They cannot control their own spending. They have pushed billions of dollars into the economy through their last two budgets and, as a result, have been working counter to the efforts of the Reserve Bank of Australia, whose sole responsibility is to try to get inflation under control. But they are not the only ones who have that responsibility. That is their sole job, but it's also the job of the Australian government to care about inflation. It destroys the standard of living of real Australians.

Real Australian families are having to make the tough choices about whether they can still do school sport on the weekend, whether they can pay for the materials their children need at school or whether they can fill up the car this week. People are having to make very, very difficult choices. The impact on small business of high inflation and high interest rates is excruciating. If those opposite ever talked to small-business people, which I doubt they do, they would know that the combination of the increasing costs of their supplies and the impact of high interest rates on their overdrafts, mortgages and business loans is having an absolutely devastating effect on the standard of living of small-business owners right across this country.

This is a government to whom the cost-of-living crisis and the decimation of people's standard of living are an afterthought. It's something they think about at five o'clock at night after they have been fighting their ideological wars the rest of the day.