Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

‘Mortgage belt suburbs, especially in the west and south-west of Sydney, have profoundly felt the effects of the eight interest rises since 2002.’ That sounds a bit like what Labor members have been saying for the last year. It would be easy to think that this statement was made by one of our Labor members, but that is a comment that was made by an analyst with Australian Property Monitors when discussing the impact that interest rate rises are having on residents in Western Sydney, particularly in the south-west of Sydney.

The mortgage belt of south-west Sydney is being belted by the interest rate increases that this government has presided over. Writs of possession orders, issued by the Supreme Court, are up 75 per cent since 2004 and rising. If we have a look at the experiences of people in the suburbs of my electorate, we find the following: in Casula, 18 writs were issued in 2006; in Eagle Vale, seven; in Eschol Park, five; in Glenfield, seven; in Horningsea Park, five; in Ingleburn, 16; in Lumeah, five; in Minto, 13; in Raby, seven; but, worst of all, a whopping 32 writs were issued in Prestons. That is the tale of the south-west of Sydney at the moment.

As Dara Dhillon, a real estate agent in my electorate at Ingleburn, reported recently, in the south-west of Sydney 90 per cent of houses coming onto the market are forced sales, and that number is continuing to rise. So, while the Prime Minister says that working families in Australia have never had it so good, what people know is that the Prime Minister has never been so wrong.

Disturbingly, the trend is set to continue. We heard earlier this week that the number of personal insolvencies has doubled in the last nine months. Debt agreements—binding agreements entered into by people who cannot afford to pay their debts—have increased by some 32 per cent in the nine-month period to March of this year; and, as Terry Gallagher, Chief Executive of the Insolvency and Trustee Service Australia, told Senate estimates: ‘You could go back 10 or 15 years when bankruptcies were around about 13,000 a year; now they stand at about 30,000 a year.’ Mistakenly, many residents believed the Prime Minister when he promised in 2004 to keep interest rates at a record low. They are now seriously questioning their misplaced trust, as they are paying more than ever for their mortgages. I know that members opposite constantly hark back to the 17 per cent interest rates of the past, happily ignoring the fact that their record on interest rates is worse and trying to write it off as the result of higher house prices. They know the truth, but they just will not admit it. Unfortunately for them, people are seeing the experiences of their friends and neighbours as they are being cruelled by the interest rate increases, and they will not be tricked next time.

Australian families know that, despite the best efforts of the Prime Minister to convince them otherwise, the interest rate increases since 2002 are costing them about $500 a month more; they know that rising petrol prices are putting constraints on their family budgets; they know that their jobs are at risk because Work Choices is still very real; and they know that the Prime Minister has got it wrong when he says that working families have never been better off.

All the pork-barrelling in the world will not help this Prime Minister when it comes to changing that perception. People in my electorate, and people generally, understand that, when it comes to this Howard government, you never get what is promised. People living in the south-west of Sydney, and people living in the outer metropolitan areas of all cities, are affected by growing interest rates and it has impacts on their families. For this government to try to pass it all off as being symptomatic of higher house prices is at best delusional and at worst a black joke on the people, the families—the so-called ‘Howard battlers’—who have been fooled once but who will not stand for being fooled a second time by this government.