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

They do not like to hear this, of course, as you can tell by the interruptions. There would be 316,000 fewer jobs, resulting in a rise in unemployment, and there would be inflation, hitting an annual rate of five per cent by 2009. This would force interest rates higher, by some 1.4 percentage points above the levels under existing policy. In other words, interest rates would be higher under the Labor Party than they are under us. A household with a mortgage of $300,000 would be paying $273 a month more in repayments under Labor. Real wages would be $787 a year lower under the policy of the Labor Party than they would be under a continuation of our policy.

This is the real hip-pocket impact of Labor’s ACTU workplace relations policy. Australian families clearly would face lower wages, higher unemployment, higher inflation and higher interest rates. And that should not come as any surprise because we have seen it all before. This is exactly what happened when we had the pre-Keating industrial relations policy under the Labor Party. We had real wages not growing at all, inflation averaging five per cent, unemployment peaking at 10 per cent and interest rates at 17 per cent. So we have seen from real experience what Labor’s policy would be like. Econtech simply reasserts that that is what will happen if Labor get back in and the Greens allow them to introduce this terrible policy. It shows that you cannot go on pretending that you have the same economic policy as us when your ACTU-inspired workplace relations policy will cause so much damage to the Australian economy.