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

I thank the honourable member for Blair for his question. On Friday of last week, the Treasury released their annual estimates of net private sector wealth for the year up until 30 June 2006. It showed that the market value of Australia’s net private sector wealth grew by 19 per cent over the course of that last full financial year. Although a main influence on wealth is family dwellings, they were not the largest contributor to this rise because of the moderation I talked of earlier to the House. The main influence was the increase in business assets, which has coincided with the Australian Stock Exchange moving to the highest levels ever recorded in its history. Millions of Australians are sharing in that wealth, either directly or through their superannuation funds. Australia’s net private sector wealth in nominal terms now stands at around $7.4 trillion dollars, or more than seven times our annual GDP. This is a consequence of the fact that more Australians are in work than ever before, their wages are higher than ever before, their investments in savings—particularly through superannuation—are higher than ever before and Australian business is more profitable than it has ever been.

The Leader of the Opposition, who has no experience of economic policy other than as a staffer in a state government, which is his main claim to economic experience, has gone so far as to try and describe the Australian economy as a—and this is a word that I am not familiar with; it sounds like a pharmaceutical of some kind or another—‘brutopia’, something that the minister for health could put on the PBS list, I think, and subsidise. He says that brutopia is ‘economic neo-liberalism’ with ‘unrestrained market capitalism’ sweeping all before it. Brutopia—also available at health shops near you as an alternative or complementary medicine!

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