Labor’s shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers says today’s interest rate hike is part of a “full-blown cost of living crisis”.

“This interest rate decision today will have a big impact on the household budgets of millions of Australians,” Chalmers said on Tuesday, following the Reserve Bank’s announcement that it would lift the official interest rate to 0.35 per cent.

Chalmers said repayments on a new fixed rate loan of $595,000 would now be about $124 more per month while a standard variable rate loan would be about $63 more a month.

“This is a very serious development in the economy, there hasn’t been an interest rate rise in almost 12 years,” he said.

“[Today, Scott Morrison asked] what would Labor not have him do. Well, Labor wouldn’t have had him waste $20 billion of JobKeeper on businesses that were already profitable and didn’t need it.

“Labor wouldn’t have had him waste $5.5 billion on submarines that will never be built, a billion on publicly funded political advertising to tell everyone how good he’s going. We wouldn’t have wasted $550 million on carparks … [including] for carparks in the treasurer’s own electorate.”