James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was a wet-lettuce-leaf contribution from the member for Rankin. He did make one observation which interested me when he was talking about the economic management and record of Kevin Rudd and the previous Labor government. I've read the Labor Party's review into why they lost the recent election. There are lots of suggestions in it, but one of them wasn't to promote the economic legacy of the Rudd-Gillard era. That did not come up in Labor's election review. So the fact they want to talk about and promote that period of time is heartening to those of us that want to stay in government for a long, long time into the future but is perhaps not in the best interests of a robust democracy in this country if you're not interested in moving on from the debacle of those six years.

Then we had the member for Whitlam, who talked about the Prime Minister's holiday. And we had the member for Morton, who went one further than talking about Kevin Rudd. He complained about low interest rates, which reminded me of the 2004 federal election and the Mark Latham election when we had that great prosecution argument in our campaign about just how high interest rates will be under Labor. We compared Mark Latham to Paul Keating and to Bob Hawke and to Gough Whitlam. The member for Morton seems to think it's a good idea to perpetuate this truism of Australian politics: that interest rates will always be high under a Labor government, and, if you've got a mortgage or you've got an aspiration to buy a home, do not vote Labor because they actually believe in high interest rates. And that was just portrayed in the contribution by the member for Morton.

The fundamentals of our economy are in a very, very strong position. We are lucky that we have done the hard work over the last seven years since we inherited that awful economic legacy from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era. We've got record trade statistics now. We've had a current account surplus for the longest period of time since the 1970s. We're investing $100 billion in infrastructure over the next 10 years. In my home state of South Australia, we have our investments in defence industry—an increase in expenditure in the budget to two per cent of GDP on defence. Of course, in the Labor era they let that go to rack and ruin.

We've reduced taxes and we're putting more money back in the pockets of the Australian people, because we know that they're much better at spending their money than governments are, no matter who's in power. We are giving Australians opportunity. We are setting the policy metrics in our economy so that people that work hard and take a risk will be rewarded for that. The statistics are there very clearly for all to see, and the fact that Labor have put this motion forward today, on the basis that they were hoping that our economic indicators would be worse than what ultimately occurred when they were released by the ABS this afternoon, is absolutely shameful. While you wish and hope for poor economic statistics, we will keep focusing on creating wealth in this country, growing jobs and giving a future to all of those businesspeople and families out there that we're very proud to represent.

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