Pressure without relief leaves budgets slammed - Oped in The Daily Telegraph 25 March 2026

The cost-of-living stranglehold: Why families are at breaking point

The latest mortgage stress data from Roy Morgan isn’t just ringing alarm bells. It’s a death knell for the financial security of families already on their knees.

Since 2023, I have warned that this cost-of-living trajectory risked a GFC-style fallout where the cost is measured in lives, not just dollars. I worked in a global financial services company in 2008 when the GFC hit with full force, and the devastation was like the iceberg that struck the titanic. It seemed obvious that it was coming after the fact.

The numbers are now shifting from a warning to a grim reality.

Following the Reserve Bank’s decision to lift the cash rate to 4.1 per cent, Roy Morgan reports that by April more than 1.43 million mortgage holders will be plunged into the danger zone of mortgage stress.

For a typical household, that translates to another $90 every month they must somehow find. On top of every other soaring cost.

Even before this latest hike, one in four borrowers were already 'at risk'; in a matter of weeks, that will climb to nearly three in ten.

A quiet anxiety is taking hold: not just about the next grocery shop, but about the terrifying possibility of losing the roof over their heads.

That anxiety is being fueled by a relentless "free fall" into poverty as petrol prices surge past $2.60 a litre.

This is no longer a cost-of-living pinch. It is financial strangulation. Slow, tightening, unyielding.

“We’re behind on our phone, gas, water and electricity. If my oldest son wasn’t helping with the bills, we’d lose the house. We are really struggling.”

That is what Kathleen in my electorate told me.

She already works seven days a week, a schedule so punishing that she has had to teach her 10-year-old how to cook for the family.

Her story is not an isolated account of life in Australia. It’s the new blueprint.

The Salvation Army’s latest Red Shield Report paints a confronting picture of what this looks like on the ground.

Many Australians are left with less than one dollar a day after paying for essentials like housing, utilities, and food. People are skipping meals, rationing groceries, turning to buy-now pay-later just to afford food or medication. Some are visiting community kitchens. Others report eating expired food simply to get by.

Australia’s "miracle" employment rate is being propped up by a taxpayer-funded hiring spree, masking a private sector that is effectively flatlining.

While the government touts 'record' employment, the reality is felt at the kitchen table: fewer than one in six Australians say they are “better off” financially than this time last year, while the majority (52%) are watching their financial security slip away.

The question is no longer “Can we get ahead?” It is: “How much longer can we hold on?”

While support payments have seen incremental increases, they’ve been outpaced by a rental market in overdrive. The result is a 19 per cent surge in severe rental stress, forcing a growing number of Australians to hand over more than half their pay cheque just to keep a roof over their heads.

Families are not absorbing one increase. They are absorbing all of them at once.

In my own electorate of Lindsay, nearly 800 people are experiencing homelessness, and thousands more homes are needed just to meet current demand.

This is what happens when pressure builds without relief.

I have spoken to parents who go without, so their children don’t have to. People who once donated to food drives are now relying on them.

Families are making impossible choices: groceries or petrol, rent or medication, bills or a plate at the table.

These are Australians that are doing everything right – working hard, often juggling multiple jobs – and still falling behind.

I hear it everywhere: “Everything is up.”

Anthony told me: “We don’t eat unless the kids eat and we hardly go anywhere.” And Richard put it plainly: “How can we be expected to live – we are only just surviving!”

This is the lived reality behind the tidy economic data: around 3.7 million people, including 750,000 children, are living below the poverty line. Many are in deep poverty, falling hundreds of dollars short every week just for the basics of survival.

Simultaneously, one in three households now faces food insecurity, wondering not what they will eat, but if they will eat. When families are skipping meals in a country like Australia, we are no longer talking about economic pressure. We are talking about national failure.

This is not a “tight month” or a temporary setback. It is a sustained pressure that is wearing people down.

With no clear relief in sight, the Albanese government must move beyond rhetoric and secure our fuel supply.

Until we see relief at the bowser, Australian families will continue to see their household budgets hollowed out by a crisis they did not create.

We need a plan that matches the scale of the stranglehold currently suffocating Australians.

People are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the chance to keep up. To catch up. And to hold onto the life they have worked so hard to build.