Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The most revealing statistic was that prior to the release of the current account data on Tuesday, only two of 20 economists surveyed by Reuters thought it was going to be in positive territory. After the data came out on Tuesday, that surged to 13 out of 20 thinking it was going to be a positive quarter. So that alone illustrates the significance of the net export data in the national accounts yesterday.

But also what was revealing in the national accounts yesterday was the ongoing relative strength—relative strength; I do not want to be misquoted again by the Treasurer or the Prime Minister—of the terms of trade. There is a graph in the national accounts, from memory on page 9, but I stand to be corrected, which indicates that the terms of trade that currently exist are more favourable to Australia than they were even when the coalition lost the election in 2007. So the mining boom might have been part of the record of the Howard government, but the terms of trade continued to improve after the election of the Rudd government in favour of the Rudd government. What we now know is that all those benefits have gone because the Rudd government has gone on a spending spree on a scale that we have never seen before—29 per cent of GDP.

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