Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

What I will say is that interest rates will categorically be lower than they would otherwise have been. There is a fascinating example here: in the entire period that the Labor Party was in government in Australia on not one monthly occasion was its lowest ever interest rate lower than the coalition’s average. Not once under a Labor government in Australia in the period since 1949 was the lowest interest rate been below the average for the entire coalition period—not once. That is a fascinating thing. With interest rates, there is a 5.6 per cent difference between the period of coalition government under Howard and Costello and the period of Labor government under Hawke and Keating.

To go beyond interest rates and try something else, let us look at inflation rates. We see that the inflation rate under the Howard and Costello government has been 2.4 per cent on average, as opposed to 5.2 per cent under the predecessor government. What about unemployment rates? The average has been 6.7 per cent and dropping every month under the coalition over the last 10 years, as opposed to 8.5 per cent under our predecessors.

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