John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

He has been representing to the Australian public something he now knows was completely false and completely misleading. When confronted on the AM program the other day, he demonstrated either a total determination to deceive the Australian people or a total ignorance of the fundamentals of his own economic attacks. It is not as if productivity were one of a number of elements of economic attack on the government—it has been the central proposition. His social attack was unfairness; his economic attack was productivity. Last week he came unstuck on both of them, and the more questions he asks about productivity, the more he demonstrates an abysmal failure to understand the first thing about the economic concept of productivity.

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