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

The member for Bendigo asked, ‘How many of these were created by the state governments?’ Talk about the blame game. I thought you were against trading off the federal and the states? Oh, sorry, you would have voted for Kevin Rudd. I am sorry. You were not part of it. If we go back over 2006, we have had 250,000 new jobs created in Australia—a quarter of a million. I want the House to think back to the crowd at the MCG protesting about Work Choices. There were 40,000 people there. Imagine that 40,000 people in the MCG and now imagine six times that number, because six times that number is the number of people that have found work in the last year. Over the course of the 10 years of this government, there have now been 1.95 million new jobs created.

Seeing as the Labor Party are so concerned about the blame game, they would have been terribly concerned about an article in today’s Daily Telegraph written by Michael Costa. It says, ‘Costello’s inflated policies hurting NSW’. No doubt the Leader of the Opposition will be straight on to him and say, ‘Mr Costa, we don’t play the blame game in the Labor Party.’ We have 1.95 million new jobs and 10 years of economic growth, we survived the Asian financial crisis, we survived the tech wreck, we survived the US recession—

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