Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Members opposite can laugh at that, but it was a serious state of affairs affecting many people in my community. There had been 11,000 full-time jobs lost, in Tasmania, between 2010 and 2013. In 2010, you might recall, the Bartlett government began its alliance with the Greens. I have a quote from The Examiner dating back to 16 February 2012. It states:

A predicted underlying surplus has been revised as a big deficit … economic growth is expected to decline … the Government will fail to meet savings targets … unemployment will continue to be relatively high … on top of this gloomy set of numbers, the forestry peace process has collapsed … Ms Giddings and her Greens cabinet colleague Nick McKim are at war … cabinet solidarity has been so bastardised as to be unrecognisable.

It was so bad that the front page of The Examiner on 12 July 2013, just before the 2013 election, announced that Kevin Rudd, the then Prime Minister, was coming to Tasmania on a rescue mission on the back of the worst employment figures in Tasmania in the last 10 years. So it is little wonder that Labor got the worst vote in a century at the 2013 election and the Giddings government was thrown out in 2014. It is little wonder today that Tasmanians fear the return of the Labor frontbench, because it is pretty much unchanged from the same group that caused such economic vandalism from 2008 to 2013. We have a situation today where we borrow $1 billion every month just to pay the interest on our debt. That is $12 billion per year—an extraordinary opportunity cost that would fund 12 new teaching hospitals in this country.

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