Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Behind all the distractions and all the mud-slinging, one thing remains true, surviving in this country is getting harder. This is what my constituents are telling me, and it's what I've been seeing with my own eyes. If you talk to people around Longman, you'll be hard pressed to meet someone who isn't struggling or worried about someone else who is. Whether it be interest rates, house prices, unemployment, the cost of utilities, support for aged care, small businesses or just the cost of a good night out, most are having to tighten their belts to unbearable limits. We are really starting to see the impact of this.

Just the other day we saw another interest rate rise, the 13th rise since the election of May 2022. This Labor government will say there have been two cuts since they came to government, but, with 13 rises and two cuts, in my book that's a net result of 11 rises, which is simply too much for the average household to bear. With house prices already being out of reach for many, anyone who has scraped by on their house purchase now has the added pressure of another quarter of a per cent in their interest rate

It pushes the cash rate to 3.85, but you need to consider that banks don't charge the Reserve Bank's rates. While for those of us who lived through the eighties and nineties that might seem low—I can remember buying my first home in 1990 with an interest rate nudging 20—the difference was that the purchase price was less than two times my annual gross wage. That would be like buying a home now for around $200,000, and I say, 'Good luck with that!' I could afford the repayments on one wage with a stay-at-home wife and four small children, so we fortunately didn't have the expense of childcare—again, good luck with that today. Let's not forget not all loans are mortgages. Increasingly we are seeing people take out personal and payday loans at sometimes crazy-high interest rates. Sometimes it's for a car. Sometimes it's for a school excursion. Sometimes it's just for groceries and utility bills. People are slipping further and further behind and taking out these high-interest loans. It only makes a bad situation worse. It's all down to bad economic management by this government.

Media sources have reported that the median house price in Queensland has now reached over $1 million. To put that in a local perspective, a home and land package for a four-bedroom family home in Beachmere starts at over $900,000. A similar package in Caboolture South, Burpengary and Morayfield starts at just under $800,000. For around $850,000, you can find a similar package in Upper Caboolture and Caboolture. Scrolling through real estate websites will show similar results for established family homes. This is quite incredible, as pre-COVID and late 2019, just six years ago, many of the homes were selling for under $400,000. Consider the current variable rate of around 5.59 per cent on an $800,000 30-year home loan. The repayments for such a loan will be $4½ thousand a month. As one of the lowest income electorates, these repayments simply do not fit into the average family income. Any additional rise in interest rates pushes homeownership further and further out of reach for the people of Longman and in Australia more generally. As a result we're seeing people forego a lot of things that we used to take for granted.

There's this myth around that the Labor Party are the party for the battler. I'd like to say that that's been dispelled. These crazy programs that they've got include policies such as the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. To buy one of these batteries for 10 kilowatt, the average out-of-pocket expense is $9,000. I've got to tell you—when I talk to my people in Longman, there are not many that have a lazy $9,000 laying around to be able to do that. So the people who have more money—who can afford to pay for these and pay the nine grand—get cheaper power, but the poor people who can't afford to pay that nine grand are even more out of pocket. That doesn't seem particularly fair to me. That doesn't seem like a government that's looking after the low-income earner. In fact, it's the very opposite. It's the government looking after high-income earners.

Let's couple that with the FBT exemption on electric vehicles. The people in Longman—a lot of them—are not going to be able to afford $70,000, $80,000 or $90,000 for a Tesla to take advantage of that. They'll be buying cheaper cars that are powered by diesel and petrol. Of course they'll be cheaper, but they don't get that FBT exemption. It's a joke. Even though this government might not stand up for those battlers—I tell you what—I'm not going to stop. I'm on your side.

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