Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sure. You will get a time to speak in a moment and then you can go home. I have not finished talking about credible comments. Julia Gillard in 2004 said of the health insurance reforms that are on the table at the moment:

Labor is committed to the maintenance of this rebate and I have given an iron clad guarantee of that on a number of occasions.

She also said in 2004:

I grow tired of saying this—Labor is committed to the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate.

At the moment we are debating that very thing on the floor of the House. I have had a quick look through the 2010 policy on health. There is nothing there that speaks about the Labor Party's walking away from its commitment to health reform. So I must admit I was astonished when the Prime Minister said that she wanted to make this year about the economy because you would think that she would have tried to shift the conversation to an area of strength, not to where we are at the moment.

On the subject of economic credibility, there is no better example of Labor's wrongheaded approach to economic policy than the Infrastructure Employment Projects Program job fund. It was set up more than 12 months ago at a cost of $150 million and it has not created a single job. In fact, for the first time in 20 years last year there was no jobs growth in Australia at all. Last week, when the Leader of the Opposition asked simple questions about aluminium jobs, the response of the Prime Minister was, 'Well, we've got a $3½ billion fund.' This goes to the heart of Labor's problems on economic policy. There is no point racking up record debt or implementing record levels of taxation if you are just going to tip it into poorly thought out funds and do not deliver on the stated objectives. You might as well pour water onto sand.

Trying to boost the economy with billions of dollars of debt is like trying to jumpstart your billycart. The billycart does not need electricity; it needs momentum. The same applies to the economy and the best way to get momentum into the economy is to create conditions of prosperity. That means growing the economy. It means giving employers an incentive to make money and, therefore, to spend money and to continue to grow. This creates jobs. That creates growth. That creates prosperity. We know about this sort of stuff because we have done it before. When we left office in 2007, unemployment was at four per cent and we had a budget surplus. Labor is now revelling in a 5.2 per cent unemployment rate because we are better off than the Greeks, the Irish and the Spaniards.

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