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

I thank the honourable member for Kingston for his question. I can inform the House that in the last 24 hours there has been another abysmal failure on the part of the opposition leader to come to grips with productivity. I would recommend to the Leader of the Opposition the old adage: ‘If you are in a hole, stop digging’—because the more he digs, the more trouble he gets into. For example, he went on Radio National today and, in an attempt to prove that there had been a decline in productivity, he combined the ABS findings on labour productivity for the market sector with the IGR findings and assumptions on productivity for the total economy. They are two completely different measures. The market sector is much more easily measured because you measure it by output, but in the total economy you have areas like the Public Service, where it is very difficult to measure output. So the cycles of market sector productivity as reported in the national accounts are different to those for total productivity which are used for long-term assumptions in the IGR.

But I do not hold the Leader of the Opposition entirely responsible for this, because when I went back to read the document that had been prepared for him by Tim Dixon, John O’Mahony and Ankit Kumar, I found that they had not themselves actually made that distinction in the 10-page briefing. Whilst I am dealing with this document, I should say in passing that it is worth recording that the Leader of the Opposition was vehemently protesting yesterday to journalists that this document had been stolen from the Labor Party, but there was one problem: the cameras had him leaving it in a public place and then demanding his staff go back and find it. I suppose he thinks it was stolen from him by his staff. That is another example of a Leader of the Opposition who always blames everybody else for his weaknesses. The document was not stolen or taken by the coalition. The camera does not lie: this document was lost by the Leader of the Opposition and him alone. It was lost in just the same way as his credibility was lost when he went on AM on 14 June. People in this House will know that I am very interested in and am counting down to ‘fundamental injustice day’, 30 June. Well, we have just passed fundamental incompetence day, 14 June, when the Leader of the Opposition went on AM

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