Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad Senator Payne has chosen, of all the questions today, to focus on this particular matter, because there has at least been an attempt at some serious consideration of some of the fiscal issues confronting Australia. However, I need to take a short divergence back to the issue of interest rates, because I think Senator Payne has demonstrated—as indeed have some of the other comments today—a fairly selective consideration of some matters. Under those opposite, official interest rates rose to 6.75 per cent. That is two percentage points higher than rates are today, at 4.75 per cent. A family on a $300,000 mortgage is paying $156 less each month in repayments than when the Liberals were last in government. That is a saving of $1,872 a year.

But, after that one brief point, let me go back to the broader fiscal strategy, because I think that is critical and very important and we should not allow the opposition to try and cherry-pick and make trite points on our attempt to deal with the issues associated with the change in exchange rate and the impact of that on our economy. We have a strategy that will get the budget back to surplus in three years, well before any major advanced economy, and we still have such a strategy. It has been endorsed, again, by the IMF, the OECD, the RBA and international credit rating agencies. We are delivering the fastest positive budget turnaround in over 40 years: fiscal tightening by 4½ per cent of GDP over three years, including 1.3 per cent of GDP this year alone. This is faster than we saw in recoveries from previous downturns and faster than anything we have seen since records have been kept. This reflects—