John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

but he has got to establish urgency. He is trying to deflect the gaze of this parliament and of the Australian public from those two very important economic debates. He has tried to divert the attention of the public and of the media away from his appalling economically illiterate performance on AM this morning when he did not understand the first thing about what he has been prattling on about for the last six months, and that is productivity. He was asked again and again whether he had read the national accounts and he either had not, or he refused to acknowledge that he had, or he was trying to misrepresent what they meant. You cannot be a credible economic alternative if you do not understand your own economic argument. This Leader of the Opposition, I charge, does not know anything about productivity. He does not know what it constitutes. He does not know the history of it in this country and he certainly does not understand the policies that are necessary to bring it about.

Having dealt with the issue of urgency, let me deal very briefly with some of the other matters that were raised by the Leader of the Opposition. Let me just explain to the House in sequence what happened in relation to the Kirribilli House event. As part of matters surrounding the federal council meeting there was a drinks party, which I hosted at Kirribilli, to which delegates to the federal council, a few other members of the Liberal Party and business observers to the council were invited. The invitations that were extended to the business observers in the first instance and the invitations on which decisions were made by those business observers to attend did not, I am advised, make any reference to attendance at Kirribilli House, but rather a reference to a Prime Minister’s reception. I regarded it as proper, as did the Federal Director of the Liberal Party.

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