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

I want to identify that the link between government spending and interest rates has been confirmed in the past few weeks in Senate estimates—and that is natural enough. Dr Gruen of Treasury said:

… if you were to engage in discretionary fiscal stimulus at a time of full employment then the implications of that would be that monetary policy would likely offset it with higher interest rates.

Given that in May the unemployment rate declined to 5.2 per cent and Treasury claims that full employment, as I understand it, is five per cent, at what point does the government believe it has a responsibility to heed the words of Dr Gruen and massively pull back on its stimulus spending?

See this speech in context