Updated ,first published
When Opposition Leader Angus Taylor took to a Canberra supermarket on Wednesday morning for a media opportunity, he had one topic on his mind: “Labor’s standard of living, cost-of-living crisis.”
Flanked by his deputy Jane Hume and shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, Taylor took up a well-worn attack line: that Labor’s budget management was responsible for the rising cost of living, and that the government was “absolutely failing Australians”.
But as the press conference swiftly moved through questions on the not-so-secret 2025 Liberal Party election review, the budget and the ongoing war in the Middle East, it eventually arrived at a query closer to home: Why had Taylor chosen to hold a press conference on cost-of-living pressures in the ACT’s highest-earning suburb?
“This is one of the wealthiest suburbs in Canberra. The median house price is $2.1 million. Why are we here? And is this part of confronting the teal movement head on?” West Australian journalist Katina Curtis asked.
The former McKinsey consultant and entrepreneur turned Liberal leader stressed that he’d seen firsthand the hardship endured by those struggling to pay bills, in towns and food banks. But, he said, hard times hit everybody.
“No one is immune from the collapse in living standards that we are seeing across this country: 10 per cent versus our peer countries. We’ll get new numbers out today, but let me give you a hot tip, Australia’s standard of living has been in freefall, and it is way behind our peer countries,” Taylor told journalists.
It is possible that locals in Red Hill, where the supermarket is celebrated for its wine club and cheese selection, feel the pinch less than most.
At the 2021 census, Red Hill had a median household weekly income of almost $4000, far above the ACT’s median of $2373 and even higher than the national median of $1746. More than 60 per cent of homes in the suburb have at least four bedrooms, compared to just 35 per cent of homes across Australia. And 22 per cent of its residents have at least three cars in the driveway.
Taylor, who moved from Sydney’s tony Woollahra to the Goulburn region to enter politics in 2013, defends his financial success as the product of hard work, but Chalmers mocked him last month as “born with a silver foot in his mouth”.
Later on Wednesday, Wilson returned the attack on Chalmers, who he has nicknamed “Pyro Jim” for fuelling inflation with debt.
He did this by performing a revision of Billy Joel’s 1989 hit We Didn’t Start the Fire, trying to keep time on the podium as he sang “the treasurer did start the inflation fire … the inflation’s burning while the treasurer is squirming”.
Also squirming? Frontbench colleagues. But job done: Wilson guaranteed the evening clips would be his hot take on the cost of living, not Taylor’s.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.
Nick Newling is a federal politics reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.