The next election will be a referendum on the economy. Government spending is running at a 40-year high outside the pandemic. Under Labor, real spending has grown by 4.4 per cent while the real economy has grown by just 1.7 per cent. When government grows faster than the economy, it pours debt petrol on the inflation fire. Underlying inflation has now been above the RBA's target band for 14 straight months, and Australia has higher core inflation than all seven G7 economies. Because Labor won't stop fuelling inflation, the Reserve Bank has been forced to raise interest rates 16 times. At 4.6 per cent, rates are at their highest level in 15 years and higher than all but one advanced economy. Families are paying the price. Someone with the average new mortgage would pay $31,000 a year more in interest than when Labor came to office, on top of electricity up 37 per cent, insurance up 43.3 per cent and food up 18.1 per cent. To pay for its spending addiction, Labor keeps coming after your money. Tax receipts are just shy of an all-time record, and Labor is taxing Australians from cradle to grave with birth taxes, life taxes and death taxes. Those taxes have hit housing hardest, delivering a trifecta of failure: rising rents, rising prices for first homes and a smash in confidence. Labor's own Budget papers say its housing taxes will mean 35,000 fewer homes. Even with near-record taxes, Labor still can't pay its bills. On 20 August, Australia hit $1 trillion of Commonwealth debt for the first time in our nation's history. Now the markets are sending a warning. Bond yields are at record highs, and the interest bill has already hit $27 billion and is rising to $36.4 billion. If you don't manage debt, eventually debt controls you. Labor has done nothing to grow its way out of this. Productivity under Labor is worse than it was during the Global Financial Crisis, the early 1990s recession and the pandemic, and the only years of negative productivity growth in the last 30 years have been under Jim Chalmers. The result is the largest decline in living standards in the developed world. This is the Albanese active inflation agenda: stoke inflation, tax inflation, spend inflation, while Australians work harder and go backwards. Fixing the cost of living starts with fixing the economy, and fixing the economy starts with fixing spending. We will put a speed limit on spending so the government can never again spend faster than the economy is growing. When government stops pouring debt petrol on the inflation fire, inflation comes down and the pressure comes off interest rates. Small businesses and self starters need to be backed, not punished. We are consulting on a Small Business Act so that small businesses get a fair go, and we address the realities of running a small business in Australia, with a single definition in federal law, the right to be paid on time, the right to be heard by the government, and the right to bid on government procurement. And we are making the instant asset write off permanent, and raising it to $50,000. Families should keep more of what they earn. Our Tax Back Guarantee will give every Australian worker a bigger, permanent tax cut every year, more than paid for by our savings. We will also axe every one of Labor's toxic taxes, from the baby tax to the death tax. We will restore the dream of home ownership by capping migration based on available housing, unlocking up to 400,000 new homes and taking up to $70,000 off the cost of building one. We will cut the cost of power by scrapping Net Zero, and our Fuel Price Shield will automatically halve fuel excise when oil spikes. We will put Australia back in charge of its debt, rather than letting the debt control us. Our Future Generations Fund will pay down Labor's trillion dollars of debt. We will also slash red tape to get the economy growing again, so we build a stand-up economy, not a sit-down economy. And we will have more to announce over the coming months before the election. Under Labor, Australians will keep working harder and going backwards. Under the Coalition, Australians who work hard will get ahead again. Lower taxes. Cheaper power. Less migration. More homes. That is how we fix our economy and protect our way of life.