Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There actually have been two interest rate decisions this week, and I wanted to highlight the lesser known interest rate decision in my contribution today. Understandably the focus has been on the Reserve Bank's decision yesterday to increase interest rates by 25 basis points, adding something like $1,000 a year in extra mortgage repayments to the average homeowner. Most homeowners are already suffering under Labor's cost-of-living crisis. Now they're suffering because government spending is out of control, and the Reserve Bank has had to increase interest rates as a result.

There's a lesser known interest rate change this week, though, that was almost buried in reporting today, and that is that the Labor Party minister for industry and innovation, Tim Ayres, has announced that he's actually cutting the interest rate that large, often-multinational solar and wind developers will have to pay to borrow from the government to fund their projects. So, in the very week that the Labor Party's spending is pushing up interest rates for average Australian families, that same Labor Party is making a decision to slash interest rates for massive companies putting forward multibillion dollar projects. As I said, most of these investors come from overseas. Almost all the products, the wind turbines and the solar panels, are made overseas. The Labor Party is slashing interest rates for them! How about the Australian family? How about they get a break? Why do they have to pay higher interest rates while these other spivs and businesses get lower interest rates? Just to make clear what has happened today, I'll read out what the government has done from the Financial Review. The Financial Review reports:

On Wednesday, Ayres will announce that investments made under the Net Zero Fund, which will begin mid-year, will only have to achieve a rate of return of 1 per cent below the five-year rate, which today would be just over 3 per cent.

Given the Net Zero Fund is financed by government bonds, Labor is in effect willing to lose money on renewables projects. For example, taxpayers could pay 4.3 per cent annual interest on $100 million …

It's actually 4.8 per cent at the moment on 10-year bonds. It would only have to return 100 basis points below, or 3.3 per cent, if it were 4.3 per cent.

They're slashing this. The previous advice on this was that, if someone wanted to borrow from this fund—as this article makes clear—they would have to pay two to three per cent above the bond rate, not one per cent below it. What Labor's done here is they've slashed interest rates by three full percentage points—that's 300 basis points. Interest rates for homeowners have gone up by 25 basis points. As I said, that's a big hit to a struggling family. For someone struggling, $1,000 a year is going to be very hard to find. They're going to have to cut back on essential things just to stay in their home. Meanwhile, a large, international, publicly financed, massive company building multibillion-dollar projects gets their interest rates slashed by up to three percentage points, or 300 basis points. So it's 25 basis points up for the average Australian family and 300 basis points down at least—potentially 400 if it were a three per cent premium—for the large company.

Where are this government's priorities? Why are they funding and rolling out massive subsidies to these net zero renewable projects, which are not lowering power prices? That's definitely not happening. They're just funding the profits of large businesses, often overseas companies, that aren't really investing back into our nation. Why is that happening? What's happened to the Labor Party? They used to be the people who support people who are struggling, who are doing it tough. But now they go to these conferences with all these international businesses. They get wowed by these corporate gobbledygook words like 'net zero' and 'ESG'. They get dollar signs in their eyes, seemingly. They get hypnotised into giving these large companies massive amounts of taxpayer support and money. This has got to stop.

The reason the interest rates are going up is that the Labor Party can't stop themselves from handing out money to these green net zero initiatives. They've had massive blowouts on their battery schemes and their electric vehicle schemes. All these schemes are going to rich people; it's rich people buying electric vehicles and batteries. Your average struggling family cannot afford a $10,000 battery even after the government subsidies. We've got to end the Labor Party's obsession with and addiction to upper-class welfare and start thinking about the lower and middle classes in this country. Slash these ridiculous government subsidies.