Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

I thank very much my South Australian colleague in the Senate Senator Ferguson for his question. I point out that for a long time now the opposition leader and shadow Treasurer have been saying that the Labor Party economic policy is exactly the same as the government’s—not a sliver of light between them. Of course, we are flattered by this comparison. I think it is an acknowledgement that the Australian economy is very strong—16 years of continuous growth, unemployment at record lows, real wages rising and low inflation.

But Labor’s problem, of course, is that it cannot claim to have the same policy as the government and at the same time find fault with individual aspects of the economics of the country, especially given the focus which the Labor Party puts on things such as high house prices and skills shortages, which are a product of a very strong economy. You cannot claim to have the same economic policies as the coalition when you have opposed every single economic reform that we have put to the parliament. You cannot simultaneously claim to have the same economic policy as the government while you have the ACTU’s industrial relations policy.

The Labor Party does not seem to understand that workplace policy is an arm of economic policy. If you embrace the ACTU position then the Labor Party, by definition, wants to take us way back to the pre-Keating era of centralised union dominated pattern bargaining, inflexible one-size-fits-all rules applied across the economy and the disastrous reintroduction of unfair dismissal laws at the level of small business. Whether or not Labor like it, the ACTU policy, which they have pledged to introduce, is an economic policy and a very bad policy for this country.

Last Friday the respected and independent economic analyst Econtech released an assessment of the impact on the Australian economy by returning to a pre-Keating system of industrial relations, as the Labor Party proposes. Econtech found that, by 2011, just four years from now, real GDP would be 4.8 per cent lower because the economy would grow at only about half the rate that it is growing under existing policy. In four years time, every Australian would be an average of $2,700 a year poorer than they would be under a continuation of current policy. There would be $11 billion less in business investment—