Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Bonner for his question. I can inform the House that business prospects have picked up. The National Australia Bank’s last quarterly business survey for December shows that expectations for the March quarter rose, with the index rising two points to 21 points. Businesses also upgraded expectations for the year ahead, with the index up five points to 32 index points. We are going through a very difficult drought at the moment, and that is depressing some areas of the Australian economy.

Notwithstanding that, the Australian economy is on a firm footing. In the year of our ninth surplus budget, we have repaid $96 billion of the Labor debt. We are funding future liabilities which were never funded by the Commonwealth before. We have a monetary policy which is locking in inflation of between two per cent and three per cent. We have unemployment at 4.5 per cent. We have had 300,000 new jobs in the last year and we have had two million new jobs over the last 10 years.

The Leader of the Opposition says that all of this represents free market fundamentalism, and he describes this economy as ‘Howard’s Brutopia’. If he wants to sweep away Howard’s Brutopia, he obviously has some kind of different economic policy in mind. There has been some speculation as to what a brutopia is. I can now authoritatively inform the House that Brutopia is a fictional country which appears in several Donald Duck stories:

Brutopia is a ... hostile country, aiming for world domination.

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