Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Craig James said:

Much of the credit for Australia’s resilience must be given to the swift actions of the Reserve Bank and government in stimulating our economy.

Apparently CommSec is not an independent commentator! Those socialists down at CommSec, you have got to watch them! Rory Robertson from Macquarie Bank—now there is a bunch of socialists for you!—said:

But the general story is the Australian economy has held up very well in the face of the most savage downturn in a generation, and the reasons for that are (1) the Reserve Bank has taken interest rates to a generational low, (2) the government has been more aggressive than ever in supporting the economy through expansion.

So that is Macquarie Bank. Then we have Su-Lin Ong, from RBC Capital Markets, who said:

So it clearly looks like the fiscal stimulus and the monetary stimulus have boosted disposable income and helped growth in the quarter.

So we had the Leader of the Opposition a few hours ago saying, ‘Every economist, every economic writer in the country is going to agree with us.’ That prediction was wrong before he had said it, but it was certainly shot out of the water within hours of him saying it. Again we see the Leader of the Opposition’s economic credibility in tatters.

Here is a fact: without the economic stimulus packages of the government, it is estimated that the GDP growth in the last quarter would have been minus 0.02 per cent. So, if the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer were in charge, Australia would be in official recession. Well done, Joe! Australia would be in official recession. The opposition want us to believe, on the one hand, that it is all down to the world economy, that the government’s actions have had absolutely no impact on economic growth over the last quarter, but, on the other hand, when it suits them, they say, ‘Australia, of course, should be doing much better than the rest of the world’—and of course we should and of course we are.

The opposition have chosen to throw their economic credibility to the wind. They have chosen to run a campaign based on cheap sophistry. They have chosen to run a cheap scare campaign on debts, and they interchange the figures of gross and net debt when it suits them. They refer to net debt when the Howard government was in office, but they refer to gross debt when the Rudd government is in office. What a ridiculous approach to take, to treat the Australian people like mugs, to say to the Australian people: ‘You can’t understand these complex economic equations. You can’t understand the reason for Australia needing to go into deficit, you wouldn’t understand the fact that revenues have been written down, so we will engage in a cheap scare campaign.’

The problem with that is that it does not stand up to a skerrick of analysis, and the threadbare nature of this argument was made particularly clear, I thought, in a very good opinion piece today in the Financial Review. You might say: ‘Who wrote it—who wrote this opinion piece? Which individual wrote it?’ Well, there was no individual. It was, if you like, an open letter from some of the most credible and respected economists in Australia, people like Fred Argy, Tony Cole, Saul Eslake, Bernie Fraser, John Freebairn, Stephen Koukoulas, Andrew Leigh, John Quiggin, Glenn Withers, the list goes on—all names honourable members would be familiar with as very eminent Australian economists. Does the shadow Treasurer disagree that these are eminent economists?

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