Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise on this matter of public importance because Australian families are being squeezed harder and harder, and this government clearly refuses to take responsibility. If people were tuning in to question time—and apparently fewer and fewer Australians are—to listen to this Prime Minister, to his Treasurer and to the response from his ministers, they would feel an incredible sense of disappointment in their government and they would say: 'They just don't get it. Do they not understand what the lives of ordinary Australians are like at this point in time?' Clearly not.

For millions of Australians, today's decision isn't read in an economic statement, the arcane pages of a financial publication or a financial market update; today's 25 percentage basis points rise in interest rates hits like a hammer blow, and that is something that this government clearly does not understand—but we do. This announcement will be felt at the kitchen table, in the mortgage repayments of Australian householders with mortgages, in the rent notice, in the power bill, in the grocery bill that somehow just keeps getting higher and higher week after week, in the cost of supplies for a battling small business and in the cost of fertiliser and diesel imports for a struggling young family farmer. For somebody whose mortgage is just coming off a fixed interest rate, to look at this 13th interest rate rise under this Labor government will bring real pain. But it's a pain that the Labor Party simply does not understand.

It is the 13th interest rate rise, and it will hurt. It is a reminder that inflation is not going anywhere under Anthony Albanese's Labor government. To listen to the Prime Minister say, as he did, 'We've turned the corner'—we haven't turned the corner. If we have, we're stuck on completely the wrong road.

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