Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

callous and insensitive remarks by the Liberal shadow finance spokesman from my home state of Tasmania.

As for the interest rate rises that we have seen, it was of course the Prime Minister himself, Mr Howard, who gave the green light for the interest rate rise that occurred yesterday. The Prime Minister normally avoids speculating on interest rate rises; he usually does not make any comment at all. However, a week and a half ago he did make comments about increases in interest rates. Referring to the Reserve Bank, the Prime Minister said he could understand why the bank would be increasing interest rates. So we have a fairly bizarre situation: the Prime Minister, in the run-up to the election, saying, ‘We will keep interest rates at record lows,’ and the situation 10 days ago when the Prime Minister was publicly giving the green light to the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates, effectively urging the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates, in view of the higher inflation rate.

Why is inflation high? Why is it increasing? Because the government has neglected some fundamental economic issues in this country. It has neglected productivity growth; productivity growth has been declining. Not only are the poor, suffering families of this country having to face finding money to pay increasing housing mortgage and other loan repayments; they are also having to, for example, cut some money out of the household budget to meet increasing food costs. In the latest inflation figures, food increased on average by 10 per cent in the last year to September. So battling families are experiencing some real difficulties while an out of touch and arrogant government is neglecting some important issues such as productivity and the education and training of the workforce—of course the government’s solution to that problem is to bring in foreign workers—and issues relating to infrastructure and investment in this country, which are so critical to lessening the pressure on interest rates.

Today the issue of national debt, the debt that the country owes to the rest of the world, was raised in question time and we referred the finance minister, Senator Minchin, to his view, when he was in opposition, on the importance of minimising foreign debt. Back in 1995, the view of the finance minister was that our then foreign debt, $167 billion—remember the debt truck that the Liberal Party rolled out as they expressed grave concern about the level of foreign debt that Australia owed to the rest of the world—