Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to join the debate today. It just so happens that at this time of night there is not a lot of other entertainment on the radio and there are quite a number of Australians listening to the broadcast of the Senate. I just want to remind those Australians who might be listening to tonight’s debate that when the current government came into being in December last year, they inherited a $22 billion surplus, left to them by the Howard-Costello government. Contrast that with 1996 when the Howard government came in. What did they have then? They had a deficit of $96 billion. In the year that we took office, 1996, the Labor government, after telling the world that they had the economy well in hand, actually had a $10 billion current account deficit in that one year alone.

Australia is facing an economic difficulty at the present time. It sort of started when Mr Rudd and that totally incompetent Treasurer, Mr Swan, took office. They have been able to manage things, to date, alone, but can you imagine what sort of problem Australia would be in today if, instead of inheriting a $22 billion surplus, the current government had instead inherited a $96 billion deficit, as the Howard-Costello government did back in 1996? Had the Rudd government inherited a $96 billion debt plus a $10 billion current account deficit, can you imagine that sorts of problems we would be facing at the moment?

I remember 1996 well, because about 10 per cent of my fellow Australians did not have a job, and that happened under a Labor government. Unemployment was enormous in 1996—