Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) | Hansard source

Life has only become harder for Australians since Labor came to government. Energy bills are skyrocketing. Grocery bills are soaring. Rents are rising rapidly. Mortgage repayments just keep going up and up, and more and more people are going on to floating rates, and the pain from that is clear. Interest rates have risen 11 times under this Albanese Labor government. A family with a typical $750,000 mortgage in south Western Sydney is now paying more than $20,000 a year. Under this government, inflation is still running rampant at six per cent. Make no mistake, prices have risen sharply in the last 12 months. Roy Morgan Research has found that, in the three months to June, 1.43 million Australian households were at risk of mortgage stress. The NAB has revealed that two-thirds of Australians under 50 say our rising cost of living is their biggest cause of stress, and Lifeline is reporting that 80 per cent of its calls now relate to cost-of-living pressures.

At a time when Australians are working harder than ever to keep a roof over their head and to put food on the table for their families, the Treasurer has decided to release a new report, Measuring What Matters, which forms part of Australia's first wellbeing framework. What could be in this new report? Presumably up-to-date data on how Australians are faring in Labor's cost-of-living crisis. Maybe some up-to-date data on mortgage stress and people dealing with those 11 rate rises. The ability for Australian families to pay their mortgage is a pretty good measure of wellbeing at the moment, but not for this government. In this so-called wellbeing report, the Treasury is using data to measure mortgage stress that ends in 2020, before Labor's 11 interest rate rises, before Labor's year of inflation, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The Treasurer has scribbled his signature on a public document which claims housing serviceability for mortgage holders has improved. The doctor of spin has lived up to his title yet again, for a doctor of spin he is, a Treasurer who is so out of touch he's using two-year-old data to try and get a picture of how Australians are faring with their mortgages. This is despite 280 submissions, six months of taxpayer funded consultation and $157 million in extra funding to the Treasury portfolio for this so-called better data in the last budget. This is a deeply embarrassing report and is, frankly, insulting to Australians struggling with a cost-of-living crisis and cuts to mental health services under Labor.

Instead of addressing the cost-of-living crisis in Australia's collapsing productivity, the Treasurer has released a document telling Australians they have never had it better. But Australians know this isn't true. They know it isn't true. They feel it isn't true every single day at the bowser, at the checkout and when they check their bank account. Australia's economy is grinding to a halt on Labor's watch. We have one of the highest core inflation rates among advanced economies. Economic growth is half the OECD average. In fact, in the last National Accounts it was 0.2 per cent for the quarter, barely above zero, and we have negative GDP per person. We have record collapses in labour productivity, negative 4.6 per cent in the last year. We have never seen this before, since data has been kept on labour productivity. This is the highest collapse in real wages on record. There's higher spending, higher interest rates, higher taxes, with an extra $185 billion of spending across two budgets, with broken promises on taxes, on super, on franking credits, on small businesses. There have been sneaky increases to personal income tax through brake creep, through raging inflation. And this is a Treasurer who would love to get rid of the stage 3 tax cuts that address exactly that issue.

We know that the priority of this government should be the economy; fighting inflation—priority 1, 2 and 3. Instead, we have a government focused on everything else. A typical Australian family is $25,000 worse off than when Labor came to government. This Treasurer doesn't need a wellbeing report to understand Australia's wellbeing; he needs a reality check. The Treasurer has confirmed that Labor's approach to the economy is out of touch and out of date.

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