Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to speak on this matter of public importance on the government's failure to reform payday lending. I particularly thank the shadow spokesperson and my neighbour, the member for Oxley, for the great work that he has done in this area. Anyone who actually goes to the local pawnshops—that's P-A-W-N; sorry, I was an English teacher in another life!—I recommend spending a day with Relationships Australia or Financial Counselling Australia. I recommend that for those opposite as well. I recently got to sit in with Vicki Cella at Relationships Australia and one of her clients and talk through how they got into difficulty where they were paying close to 884 per cent interest.

Whilst I know up-front that interest is a great thing and gives opportunities to young people and other people to do all sorts of things in life, excessive interest hikes are not something that the Labor Party can support. While waiting for the government to act on this, we've seen so many more people—in fact, 150,000 new households—sign up for payday loans in the last 18 months alone. So many of those people are going to be paying excessive interest rates. We know the story. It can be something as simple as your car running over a nail and getting a flat tyre and you don't have a spare tyre. That could change someone's household budget. These are the people we're talking about. It could be something as simple as the washing machine breaking down and not being able to put clean clothes on your kids to send them off to school. Or, as we've heard from some of the other speakers, there are all of those tempting loans when you're having a beer. There are all of these sorts of instant credit lures, basically.

We're concerned about it. What did we see from those opposite? We saw the member for Fadden actually organising within the Liberal Party a 'friends of payday lending' group. Unbelievable! And how was he rewarded? How was this numbers person for the Prime Minister rewarded? How was this data bandit, someone who's prepared to pay $38,000 back to the government because of his wi-fi data—$3,000 a month he's been paying for data—able to come in and say, 'Put me in charge of payday lending'? If you think paying $3,000 a month for data is normal, you are not going to have problem with someone paying 884 per cent interest rates for a spare tyre for their car or a replacement washing machine. You need that car to get to work. This the difference that we see. This can be the difference between food and fear for a household, the difference between having a home and living in harm's way, the difference between kids being able to sleep at night and the waking nightmare that can be that debt trap that the shadow minister referred to, that spiral down into debt where you cannot get out. That is why we need funding for things like Relationships Australia. It's because people get caught up, tricked and trapped.

Yes, I do believe in free will and people making choices, but—I tell you what—the rates that I can get with a good credit rating at a bank is nothing like the situation for some of the constituents I have spoken to. People go in to a payday lender looking to hopefully have enough money to buy their kid a second-hand bike for their birthday and come out having ended up paying $1,000 or $2,000 for a TV. So people can be tricked into believing the heavy-handed sales techniques that are used.

We have seen this delay. We have soaring interest rates, skyrocketing fees and a person in charge, the Assistant Treasurer, who after—what?—10 years in parliament comes in here and says he is 'doing a bunch of stuff'. That was his considered response, with all the resources of his department. It didn't address the delay. It didn't address the hardship that is experienced by so many Australians because of his tardiness and his delay. We know that hardship is blood in the water for these loan sharks. As soon as they see people doing it tough, they jump on them and try to make their life even more difficult. That's why we should— (Time expired)

See this speech in context