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

I remind the Leader of the Opposition that the thing called the global financial crisis happened. I remind the Leader of the Opposition, who knows nothing about economics, that we have just lived through the single-biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. And I remind the Leader of the Opposition that in the circumstances of that economic crisis this nation faced a choice. You could see that crisis enveloping the world and you could decide that you were going to cut and cut and cut and cut and cut your budget. In order to do so you would have needed to do something like stop all payments to age pensioners or stop all payments for Medicare. Yes, you could have chosen to do that, and if you had done that then our economy would have catapulted into recession and hundreds of thousands of people would have been put out of work, and the future for young Australians wanting to be apprentices would have been destroyed forever. Instead of taking that reckless, irresponsible approach that developed nations around the world did not take—no developed nation around the world, not President Obama and not Prime Minister Cameron followed that prescription that the Leader of the Opposition apparently believes in.

As a result of that, the government did sustain some debt, and we chose to do that to stimulate the economy. We are now living in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, where company revenue, corporate revenue to the government—indeed, revenue generally—has not returned to the levels that were predicted by our Treasury. Indeed, per unit of GDP, we are seeing less revenue to the government than at any time since the recovery from the 1990s recession. In those circumstances you have another choice: do you cut and cut and cut because of those revenue reductions, throwing people out of work, jeopardising growth in our economy? Is that what you do? Or do you pursue the strategy of the government, which is jobs and growth as well as a prudent budget position?

The Leader of the Opposition might well say that his economic strategy would be to cut and cut and cut and cut. Well, if that is his economic strategy he should have the decency to tell the Australian people who those cuts would fall on, how hard they would hit schools, hit hospitals, hit family payments, hit pensioners and hit defence. He has an obligation to specify that. Instead, he comes in here with these statements that just show he has no understanding of the modern economy and that his only approach to issues of economic management is continued negativity and risk. (Time expired)

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