Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President, that does indeed sound familiar. It is not hard to recognise that situation. That is the advice that the then Treasury secretary had to tender to incoming Prime Minister Howard and Treasurer Costello in 1996. The Australian Labor Party had lied to the Australian people. They said the budget was in surplus when it was not. There was $96 billion of debt and a $12 billion budget deficit. That situation, as we all know, was not of the coalition’s making, but the coalition resolved to fix it. It was not easy. It was not popular. The easy thing would have been to keep borrowing, but we chose to do the right thing.

What made an already difficult task of balancing the budget and repaying the debt that much harder was the Australian Labor Party. The Australian Labor Party opposed, as we know, each and every measure designed to put the budget back into balance. The hide, the cheek! Labor created the debt and they tried at every step to stop us repaying it. We did not expect Labor to repay the debt; we just wanted them to get out of the way. They refused. It was just cheapjack, opportunistic politics at its worst. Despite the opposition, we balanced the budget and we repaid every cent of Labor’s $96 billion debt—every cent.

That is not all we did. We established an asset position—a future fund, a higher education fund and a health fund. We established the world’s best corporate financial and banking structures and, as a result of that, the best banking and financial culture in the world. On top of that, we gave the Reserve Bank independence. I can remember the then shadow Treasurer, Gareth Evans, threatening to sue the government for taking that step—that was quite extraordinary.

During our time in office we presided over a booming economy with record low unemployment and a dramatic increase in household wealth. That is the legacy of the coalition government. That was the bequest of the coalition to the Australian Labor Party. Upon inheriting office, Labor complained that the coalition had done too well, that the economy was growing too strongly. Can you believe that—the government complaining that the economy was growing too strongly? And who was to blame for that? Who was to blame for the fact that the Australian economy was growing too strongly? It was the coalition. We plead guilty. It was our fault that the Australian economy was booming.