Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

According to my information, the overnight interest rates swap moved by one basis point, from 5.76 to 5.77. That is one basis point. I will have the Leader of the Opposition’s figures investigated, but I always take his figures with a grain of salt. This is the man who, back in 1996, said a $10 billion budget deficit was a surplus. But there is one question that we are always happy to take from the Australian Labor Party: a question on interest rates. Those of us who have been in this place in opposition well remember the then Leader of the House and Minister for Finance presiding over a government which had home mortgage interest rates at 17 per cent. Whilst he was in office, through the whole period of the Keating years, the average home mortgage interest rate was 12¾ per cent, compared with an interest rate today of 7½ per cent.

Mr Speaker, if you were paying the ‘Kim Beazley average rate’—not his highest rate but his average rate—you would be paying another $215 on a standard mortgage loan today. So the evidence is there. This is the government which has so run economic policy as to keep interest rates low. We will continue to manage the Australian economy so as to keep interest rates low, and they will be substantially lower than the Australian Labor Party’s 12¾ per cent. If the Australian public want to make an assessment of records in relation to interest rates, we would invite them to do so because there is one person who would be coming down the bottom of the list and he goes by the name of the Leader of the Opposition.

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