The Reserve Bank of Australia has pushed interest rates to a 15-year high of 4.60 per cent, delivering another crushing blow to families, small businesses, and primary producers across Central Queensland.
Federal Member for Flynn, Colin Boyce MP warns that Canberra's persistent overspending and Labor's lack of economic strategy are forcing regional families to pay the price.
"To get to the basic guts of it, with the Reserve Bank of Australia Board lifting the official cash rate target to a 15-year high of 4.60 per cent, further pressure lands directly on household budgets, small businesses, and regional communities," Mr Boyce said.
"Marking the fourth rate hike in 2026 alone and the 16th under the Albanese Labor Government's bad economic management, this decision leaves Australia facing some of the highest official borrowing costs in the advanced world outside Iceland.
"Whenever interest rates rise, Treasurer Jim Chalmers frantically searches for external excuses, attempting to blame international market turbulence and Middle East conflict, but the timing just doesn't stack up.
"The simple fact is that when you keep spending taxpayer money without any productivity attached to it, it costs the country more money without delivering any genuine returns for everyday Australians trying to pay off a mortgage.
"With core inflation sitting at 3.6 per cent, above the RBA's target band for 13 consecutive months, Coalition modelling and Commonwealth Bank economic analysis of RBA rate rises show the average new mortgage holder in Australia must now find over $31,000 extra per year in interest repayments compared to May 2022 levels.
"When you look at what earns the big dollars for Australia, our mining, resources, and agricultural sectors, Labor is putting roadblocks in front of the very industries that balance the nation's books and pay our bills.
"In Gladstone, crippling energy costs forced the Boyne Aluminium Smelter to seek $1 billion in emergency government support just to keep operations viable, while major regional smelters across the country required billions more.
"That industrial burden lands directly alongside a 22.4 per cent jump in electricity bills, an 18 per cent climb in grocery prices, and regional diesel pushing between $2.60 and $2.91 per litre across Central Queensland transport corridors.
"Treasury's Final Budget Outcome shows federal spending at a 40-year non-pandemic peak of 26.9 per cent of GDP, with public sector spending growing at 4.3 per cent, nearly double the broader economy's 2.4 per cent pace, while Coalition budget analysis reveals this public sector growth has been fuelled by an intake of 28 additional federal public servants every single day.
"When public bureaucracy expands at double the rate of the real economy, you're blowing big dollars without any productive return, pushing gross debt past $1 trillion when Coalition financial modelling demonstrates that maintaining a spending offset rule would have produced a $22 billion surplus rather than a $22 billion deficit.
"We have to get back to backing the industries that bring in the big dollars, our miners, our farmers, and our regional workers.
"Central Queenslanders who feed, fuel, and power this nation deserves a government in Canberra that stops putting roadblocks in their way, pulls its belt in, and adopts a real plan to get Australia back on track," Mr Boyce said.
