Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, something like 11 per cent. We had a long, hard slog to bring unemployment to 4.5 per cent, and that was a proud achievement. For workers over the 11 years of the Howard government productivity increased and so did wages. So it is just a fallacy put out by the Labor Party for their own political justifications to say that the workers were worse off under a Liberal-National Party government. But it is typical of Senator Cameron and his side to throw out these figures, unsourced. Senator Cameron has learnt from the best. He has learnt from his own leaders. They do not ever source their figures. They never tested their figures. They do not even test their policies or the legislation that comes through this parliament. We have seen it with the policy on pink batts. They were too busy to cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the billions of dollars they spent on pink batts. They had to rush out the Building the Education Revolution program—