George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Wong, I'm bound to say you do disappoint me. Here we are in the last question time of the year, and you'd think we could have had something a little bit more substantial. Given the festive season and the news from the House of Representatives later today that you and I are both looking forward to, I'm not going to chastise you too strongly, but I must observe that, if the best you can do for the very first question in the very last question time of the year is to ask yet another tricky political question, I'm disappointed with you.

But your question does give me the opportunity to reflect upon all of the great achievements of the Turnbull government in 2017, which will be continuing in 2018. We've only recently had the September quarter national accounts, which show that GDP grew by 0.6 per cent in the September quarter. It has grown over the last 12 months by 2.8 per cent—a very, very strong rate of growth. We also have the labour market statistics, which show that, in the last 12 months, 355,000 new jobs were created—almost a thousand new jobs a day—and, of those, 85 per cent were full-time jobs. That is the fastest rate of jobs creation in more than 20 years—another achievement of the Turnbull government.

Senator Wong, you talked also about the National Energy Guarantee. Absolutely, we are very proud of the National Energy Guarantee. For more than a decade, including in this place, Australian energy policy has been deadlocked. It has been deadlocked, and now there has been a breakthrough, thanks to Prime Minister Turnbull. (Time expired)