Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, congratulations on the job. The member for Wentworth is acutely embarrassed, most particularly about a number of outrageous and wildly inaccurate statements that he has been making about inflation in the last month or so. What we have seen today from the shadow Treasurer in his discussion of inflation is an attempt simply to fiddle the figures because the truth is too hard for him to digest and too hard for him to comprehend. He spoke before about how proud the member for Higgins was of his economic record—so proud indeed that he could not even attend the House to listen to the member for Wentworth! He would not come, because the record is far from perfect. We are going to have a debate about the size of our inflation problem; we are going to have a debate about its causes, because getting this right is absolutely essential to Australia’s economic future.

If the member for Wentworth were to have his way, there would not be the policies in place that need to address the capacity constraints that we have experienced for years and years in relation to infrastructure and skills. There would not be those policies in place at all because the former government was in denial. We have this wonderful construction and fiddling of the figures because he is so embarrassed, most particularly by his performance on Insiders on Sunday. What did he say on Insiders on Sunday? I will tell you what he said. He said that the underlying inflation rate did not matter—the underlying inflation rate was not the one used by the Reserve Bank—and that the government was wrong to focus on the underlying inflation rate.

The other porky that he told on Insiders on Sunday was that there is no such figure as a 3.6 per cent underlying inflation rate; it does not exist on the Reserve Bank’s website. Wrong again! It is most certainly there. What he has been trying to do is to somehow reanalyse the figures to wash away the inflation that everyone in the community has been feeling, not just for the last two months, three months or six months but for years and years. The reason the member for Wentworth is so embarrassed about this is that he dropped another clanger a couple of weeks ago. Do you know what that clanger was? He said inflation was a fairy story. And perhaps nothing more demonstrated how out of touch the member for Wentworth is than his description of that inflation figure for the December quarter as a fairy story, because working families around this country know about inflation. They do not need the member for Wentworth to fiddle the figures. They have been feeling inflation, because it has been on the march for the last two years—substantially on the march. Of course, the former government was warned.

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