Kym Richardson (Kingston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Treasurer. Would the Treasurer inform the House of recent economic data? What does this data indicate about the strength of the Australian economy?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Kingston for his question. Since the House last sat, the national accounts for the December quarter have been released. They show that GDP grew one per cent in the December quarter and that growth through the year was 2.8 per cent higher than a year ago. This comes at a time when the rural sector of Australia is in a very deep drought. In fact, rural production has fallen 22.8 per cent over the last year, an extraordinary fall, as a consequence of drought. The fact that the Australian economy continued to grow at all is testament to the strength in other sectors, particularly in relation to consumption, business investment and indeed exports, which, apart from rural exports, also grew during the course of the year.

In addition to that, we have seen recently the labour force figures released for February. The good news with the labour force figures is that the number of people in work in the month of February increased by 22,000. Twenty-two thousand new jobs were created in the month of February. Over the course of the last year in Australia there has been a net addition of 294,000 jobs. Think about that. In the last year there were 365 days and 294,000 jobs—that is nearly 1,000 jobs a day created in the Australian economy over the last year. Of course, nearly all of that was during the period of Work Choices. So whatever the opposition claimed about Work Choices destroying jobs, the reality is that we have seen during the last 12 months extraordinary employment growth in this country.

The opposition leader says that this is ‘Brutopia’, that there is something wrong with this economy. Can I remind him that, when his party was in power, unemployment stood at about 11 per cent and unemployment is now at 4.6 per cent. Unemployment has been below six per cent for 43 consecutive months in Australia. I can inform the House that, for the first time since the government was elected in 1996, there have been two million new jobs created in the Australian economy. This is a government which has now presided over two million new jobs in the Australian economy, which is job creation unparalleled in recent Australian history.