Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Speaker. I thank the member for North Sydney for his question. I can see that the summertime fitness regime has involved weight lifting as well. Congratulations to him—well done!

I refer the member for North Sydney to my earlier answer in the House, I refer him to my statements at the National Press Club and I ask him, in what should be a year where there is the time and the space and the certainty for a sophisticated policy debate, to try and deal with the level of sophistication necessary in the economic debate before this nation.

We find ourselves in a circumstance where, per unit of GDP, less revenue is being returned to the government than at any time since the 1990s. Indeed, around the world, other democracies, other developed countries, are also struggling with this phenomenon. There are no doubt cyclical factors at play and, as I indicated in my National Press Club speech, and as the Assistant Treasurer has said on more than one occasion, there may be some things about the accounting of profits in the modern age that need to be thought about and thought about in the context of the G20. We need to deal with facts.

Dealing with the facts and dealing with the revenue write-downs that we have seen, Treasury are doing their best, their best projections after the GFC. We have seen huge write-downs from before the GFC. Then we have seen huge write-downs again that Treasury did not forecast and did not predict. In the circumstances of those write-downs, you have got a clear choice to make: do you focus on jobs and growth or don't you? This is the choice that we faced when the global financial crisis was at its height, and we as a government said, 'You focus on jobs and growth.' I respect that the opposition made the opposite decision, and that is their judgement call. They decided that the nation should not focus on jobs and growth, and that is why they opposed our economic stimulus package. So there is a divide here. We focus on jobs and growth. The opposition is committed to the opposite, to not focusing on jobs and growth.

We are at another moment where a decision needs to be made: do you focus on jobs and growth? We are focusing on jobs and growth. If the member for North Sydney wants to lead the economic debate of the opposition once again into not focusing on jobs and growth, that is a matter for him, and he will be held to account for it. But there is nothing more important to this Labor government than the jobs of working people. We have put them first in the most difficult of economic days, and we will put those jobs first now.

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