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

I thank the member for Bonner for her question, because the Australian economy has outperformed virtually every other advanced economy during this global recession. I think that is something that all Australians are proud of—the performance of our economy during this global recession; the fact that we have created in Australia, together, over 180,000 jobs; and the fact that we continued to grow as other economies were falling into recession.

We have had some judgment about this from the OECD, who put a report out last week. They remarked particularly on the performance of the Reserve Bank—and of course on the performance of the government, in terms of the measures that we took to stimulate the economy. They highlighted the role that monetary and fiscal policy has played in supporting our economy during this global recession. We get some commentary from those opposite that the performance of the Australian economy is due to a whole lot of things other than monetary and fiscal policy. It is true that the very good regulation of our financial system has played a part. It is also the case that strong growth in the Asia-Pacific has been important. But what we see in the OECD report is their belief that monetary and fiscal policy domestically here was absolutely fundamental. They made this point:

This would not have been enough if monetary and fiscal policies had not been developed progressively to respond to the crisis. These have in no small part shielded businesses and citizens from the initial damaging impacts of the global recession.

Of course there has been a bit of commentary around monetary policy. We had the shadow Treasurer running around the place last week, peddling his phoney claims about some link between current spending and interest rates. As we know, Tinkerbell over there was repudiated fundamentally by the Reserve Bank governor in his evidence to the committee only last week—and, of course, was also repudiated fundamentally by the OECD. This is what they said about what interest rate rises in Australia have reflected:

… the relatively favourable trends experienced by the economy over the recent period and the reduction of the large global downside risk which prevailed until mid-2009.

So, like the Reserve Bank governor, they have completely repudiated the point that has been made by the shadow Treasurer. Of course, sometimes there is a little bit of honesty from Tinkerbell—

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