Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about interest rates. Interest rates are something that we've talked a lot about over the last few years. You would have heard time and time again those on this side of the chamber telling the Australian people that interest rates are always lower under the Liberals and under a coalition government. I've said it myself, but I thought I would just dig back through the records and look at the actual facts, and put some of the facts about those average interest rates under Labor versus the coalition on the table.

Firstly, for mortgage holders: obviously, the underlying cash rate is not the mortgage rate—it's two to three per cent higher for a mortgage rate. But the average cash rate since 1990, when the RBA started publishing the cash rate, is 6.17 per cent under Labor. Under the coalition it's 3.69 per cent. Again, for an average mortgage holder, where the interest rates are two to three per cent higher than those average cash rates, you're looking at an average interest rate under Labor of around eight per cent—between eight and nine per cent—and, under the coalition, of between four and 4½ per cent. So you're talking about a very real difference for mortgage holders in this country.

What about the highest cash rate we've seen in that period since 1990? That's 32 years—let's call it a generation. Under Labor, the highest rate was over 17 per cent, after the recession we had to have in 1990. The highest cash rate under the coalition government was 6.75 per cent. My mum and dad were small-business people. My mum and dad had a farm with an overdraft. This is something that affects small business owners fundamentally. A difference like this was the difference between making a profit and making a loss in those years under Labor, when we saw the interest rates hit 17 per cent. Again, this was the cash rate; a cash rate of 17 per cent meant a rate of 22 to 23 per cent per annum for my mum and dad's overdraft.

And, finally, let's have a look at the lowest cash rate recorded under the ALP versus under the coalition government. The lowest cash rate recorded under the ALP was 0.85 per cent, and I admit that's low. It happened to be in the first month when they were in government, and they inherited it from the coalition government. But under the coalition government it was 0.1 per cent. So we can see over a period of 30 years—in fact, over the entire period where the RBA has been publishing a target cash rate—the coalition delivering lower interest rates than Labor. That's something that all Australians should remember.