Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, my question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer outline for the House the importance of responsible economic and fiscal management in supporting Australian jobs and economic growth? What are the risks to this?

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

I thank the member for Robertson for her question because there is no doubt there are very large challenges in the global economy. We have seen that demonstrated in the last 48 hours. Just as we should not hold out false optimism, we should not get carried away with false pessimism. Despite all of the global challenges, our economy does walk tall in the world. We have got solid growth. We have got low unemployment. We have got a very big investment pipeline. We have got strong public finances. What the government has for the future is a very big productivity agenda with investment in skills, investment in infrastructure through the NBN and fundamental tax reform. All of these are very important given our global circumstances.

This government got the big economic calls right during the global recession. We did not experience a recession in this country because we got the big calls right. The consequence of that has been the creation of something like 700,000 jobs. Overnight we have just seen that Moody's has put the United Kingdom on negative watch. That means Australia is now among an elite group of eight countries with the stable, gold plated AAA rating from all three major agencies globally—the first time in our history and not something that was achieved under the previous government. We obviously do have job losses in parts of our economy, even in parts of our economy where the companies are extremely profitable, but we should not lose sight of the fact that unemployment in this country is 5.2 per cent, half the rate in Europe and substantially lower than just about every other developed economy.

All of this global uncertainty just underscores why it is so important to bring our budget back to surplus in 2012-13. The global volatility makes that an imperative. Those opposite have been fumbling and bumbling around over the past week and running away from their commitment to a surplus, which is so important to Australia at this time of global volatility. We know they are running away from that because they have got a $70 billion crater in their budget bottom line. I do not think anyone on this side of the House would be too surprised by that because those on the other side of the House have got form. They were found by the Treasury to have covered up an $11 billion hole in their election costings. We have got further proof of that because the auditors in whom those opposite had great faith have been found guilty of professional misconduct. So they took a lie to the people of Australia— (Time expired)