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

I thank the member for Stirling. I know he is very interested in, and well informed about, productivity. I am very happy to inform the House that when the government assumed office in 1996 the level of unemployment in Stirling was 9.4 per cent, and it is now 5.2 per cent. The member has asked me about trends in relation to productivity. In answering that question, I recommend that he not take the advice tendered by the Leader of the Opposition on Radio National this morning. What the Leader of the Opposition was doing this morning was deliberately using different figures in relation to the claims that he was making about productivity. If you listened very carefully, just on the surface it sounded okay. He said that between 1993 and 1998 we were running at annual average productivity growth of 3.3 per cent, between 1998 and 2003 that fell to 2.1 per cent, and then he went on to say: ‘If you look at Mr Costello’s Intergenerational report, the projected annual productivity growth for the decade we are currently in is only 1.5 per cent per year.’ The problem with that is that he was using figures that were measured by different measures of productivity. The first two figures measured productivity movements in the market sector of the economy, and the second figure measured movements in the entire economy.

In pointing out the duplicity of the Leader of the Opposition, I would have thought that the best authority I could quote was in fact the Productivity Commission itself. On its website, the Productivity Commission describes the difference between the two measures. The Productivity Commission says this:

Whilst productivity can be measured for the economy as a whole, productivity in the market sector of the economy provides a more accurate indication of aggregate productivity. The market sector is where output can be reasonably well measured—by market transactions … In ‘non-market’ industries, such as government administration, outputs are typically measured in terms of expenditure on inputs.

What the Leader of the Opposition has deliberately done is to take what is by definition a measurement of productivity that would yield a low result and compare it with measurements of productivity which by definition would yield higher results. In the process, he has deliberately set out to mislead the Australian public in relation to this issue. He did not disclose this in the interview that he gave this morning. He must have known—or after the interview he would have been told by his advisers—that he had misled the Australian public. Once again we have the Leader of the Opposition faced with the dilemma of confessing to one of two sins: is he ignorant of what productivity represents in this country or, if not ignorant, has he deliberately misled the Australian public by falsely comparing a set of figures with another set of figures, knowing full well that the measurements and the definitions of those two figures are quite different? Everybody knows that it is difficult to measure productivity in government administration, in health and education services and in services generally, whereas it is very easy to measure productivity in mining and manufacturing. What the Leader of the Opposition did was to conflate the two in the interview this morning to give a completely false impression and to continue the process of deceiving and misleading the Australian people on what he says is the centrepiece of his economic attack on the government. The Leader of the Opposition ought to lift his head from his papers and face the reality that, again, he has deliberately deceived the Australian people.

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