Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (13:54): We learned in today’s AFR that this evening our Prime Minister, in a speech, will be telling a group of business leaders that, with regard to the fight against inflation, the worst is now behind us. You can almost picture him on the aircraft carrier: ‘Mission accomplished! The worst is behind us.’ But yesterday we heard from the RBA, who told us a very different story about the economy. The governor told us that the inflation problem is far from solved. The economy is still running hot. We saw the job numbers come out of Australia and the US. We’re running at four times the rate of the US. Our economy is running hot. The inflation problem has not been solved. We saw that, at best, inflation will sustainably return to the midpoint of the band only by 2026. We heard that the recent decline in headline inflation is only temporary. It will go back up. This is very different from the vision that the Prime Minister is going to try to paint tonight.
We heard very clearly that government spending is driving inflation. In fact, we heard that the RBA have been shocked by the amount of spending that has come from this government and have had to revise, multiple times, their estimates of what that spending would be. It has kept going up and up, and every time it has breached that limit.
Given these two very different visions of what’s happening in our economy, I stand with the Governor of the RBA. I call on the government: stop your reckless spending spree and look after Australians. Inflation does not bear down evenly on the economy. It hurts the most vulnerable, and your spending is causing that pain to Australians right now.
