By: Nick Tyrrell
Liberal Senate candidate for the ACT Nick Tyrrell says Canberra home owners will pay about $430 more a month than they did at the start of the year on a typical new loan after today’s fourth Reserve Bank rate rise for 2026, while the Finance Minister, Katy Gallagher, gaslights Australians on the fuel she’s pouring on the inflationary fire.
The RBA lifted the cash rate to 4.60 per cent, the highest since 2011. On the average new ACT owner-occupier loan of $666,000 (ABS, June quarter 2026), that is about $109 a month more, and about $430 a month more than at the start of the year.
Yesterday Senator Gallagher and Treasurer Jim Chalmers released the 2025-26 Final Budget Outcome. Its big claim is made against the 2022 Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook: this year’s deficit, it says, is “around half the estimated deficit at the 2022 PEFO”.
Measured against last year, the government’s own Final Budget Outcomes show the underlying deficit more than doubled, from just under $10 billion in 2024-25 to $22.3 billion, and payments rose from 26.2 to 26.9 per cent of GDP.
“If you have to go back to 2022 to find good news, you already know your numbers must be cooked,” Mr Tyrrell said.
“Senator Gallagher told ABC Radio National on Monday that she has found savings so government “investment” is ‘not adding to the inflation challenge in our economy’.
Four rate rises later, Canberrans can draw their own conclusions. They do not need an outdated forecast from 2022 to know what is happening to their mortgage, and they are smart enough to see the government’s trickery,” Mr Tyrrell said.
Small businesses carry the same rise. NAB’s latest quarterly survey has business confidence at minus 19, some 22 points below its long-run average.
“That is one less hire and one less piece of equipment, in a city where people should be able to get ahead. The Coalition will put a speed limit on spending. Labor puts a 2022 reference point on it and hopes nobody notices,” Mr Tyrrell said.
Even Crikey’s politics editor, Bernard Keane, wrote today that Labor lost control of its spending in 2025-26 and that its “rhetorical tricks can’t hide it”.
Mr Tyrrell challenged Senator Gallagher to compare this year with last year, not 2022, and to tell Canberra mortgage holders what concrete measures she will take to rein in spending before the RBA meets again in November.