Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity in this debate to talk about the experience of a family in my electorate. Their circumstances really reflect the pressures that are being felt by people all across this nation as the cost of living continues to rise under this government. Jason and his wife, Emma, have two small children. They purchased their home in Robina in 2021 and secured a fixed mortgage which will soon be coming to an end. Jason currently pays around $2,000 a month for their four-bedroom home, but the rise in interest rates will see their finances take a huge hit, with repayments expected to more than double. As interest rates continue to go up month after month under this government, everyday Australians like Jason are seriously stressed. Jason has already taken a second job and cancelled the children's swimming lessons in anticipation. He is determined to ensure that they don't lose the family home that they worked so hard to buy and renovate. As Jason said in a recent news article:

It's a flow-on effect as interest rates go up and repayments go up but then you have day-to-day living costs—you have shopping, insurance, registration for vehicles, electricity, rates and water bills.

Our repayments are going to double and you have the burden of everything else going up on the back of that …

It does bring stress into the household, which is unfortunate, and it's difficult to work so much and be so tired from that and stressed from trying to pull everything together.

Unfortunately, Jason is not alone in this experience. He is one of 800,000 mortgage holders in Australia who are facing a mortgage cliff as their lower fixed rate ends, and their budgets have already taken a hit in the past year. I do have to ask the question, as part of this debate, what the plan is from the Labor government to deal with these significant cost-of-living issues.

Housing is one of the most significant issues for people in Australia at the moment, as I have just described with Jason's circumstances. The fact is that his circumstances are repeated in many, many households right across Australia. The question then becomes: what is the Labor government doing to support Jason? We know that interest rates are rising. We know that that will have a cost-of-living impact. But we also know with the housing crisis that many people are finding it very difficult to find a house to purchase in the first instance because the cost of houses has gone absolutely through the roof.

We also know that vacancy rates on rentals are at all-time lows in many parts of Australia. In my electorate on the Gold Coast, I can assure the House that it is extraordinarily difficult to find a property to rent in the first instance. And, if you do find something, there are many other people also seeking to rent that property and the price of that rental is sky high.

So we have an issue where people in Australia are really struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and that is quite separate to the issue of those people who have been impacted by domestic and family violence. We know—and there is significant evidence to show this—that people who have been affected by domestic and family violence are staying in violent situations simply because they cannot afford to leave. They cannot afford to leave because either they can't find somewhere to go or they can't afford the cost in the instance that they can find something.

I would encourage people to have a look around them and see what is happening in the shops. You'll see that there is a decline in the number of people going to shopping centres. Certainly people are still going there for the supermarkets, but other stores that are part of the larger shopping complexes are really struggling to attract customers into their shops. If you look at the numbers of people who are visiting those shopping centres they're obviously in a state of decline. They've gone down particularly since Christmas but, quite frankly, many of us who were in shopping centres pre Christmas would have noticed that the number of people there had gone down significantly. Often, you see people walking around shopping centres and they haven't bought anything at all. They've certainly bought food, but they must have that. This has a serious impact on people in the retail sector. But, more importantly, the cost of living for people in Australia has to be dealt with, and the Labor government is missing in action.