Senate debates

Tuesday, 12 May 2020

Questions without Notice: Take Note of Answers

Covid-19

3:10 pm

Photo of Zed SeseljaZed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters) Share this | Hansard source

In support of the Minister for Finance's statement to the Senate today, and indeed the Treasurer's statement to the House, I will start by outlining the significant challenges this nation is facing at the moment, the very strong way we have responded to those challenges as a nation—this health crisis and this economic crisis—and then point to the way forward. Only a few weeks ago—it seems a lot longer—as the significance of this pandemic became apparent we faced a very significant health and economic crisis. I think as a nation we can be very, very proud of how we have responded to that crisis.

When it comes to dealing with the health crisis, through the leadership of the Prime Minister, the health minister and the cabinet—and, indeed, informing the national cabinet—we have seen a response that I think is the envy of most of the rest of the world. You would not want to be dealing with this significant challenge in virtually any country other than Australia right now. Notwithstanding that, it has had a major impact on Australia even though our performance has much better than most other comparable countries. It has had a health impact. Of course, we mourn those who have been lost and we are with those who have suffered and our frontline health workers who have been dealing with that.

The economic impact has been huge. We have sought to deal with that economic impact on the basis of principles and values. As we seek to come out of this economic and health crisis, we will maintain that approach—and I will get to the contrast in a moment. But we have to go back to the starting point of what we had. What we have just heard from Senator Watt, and what we have from the Labor Party in their criticism generally, is a big lie. They claim that the Australian economy was not doing well, was not strong, going into this crisis. That is not true. That was not the view of the Reserve Bank. That was not the view of the IMF. We just had Senator Watt saying we had higher unemployment. Well, it was 5.1 per cent going into this crisis and we saw economic growth ticking up. We saw expected economic growth in 2020 and 2021 being higher than virtually every other G7 economy. So this big lie that the Labor Party looks to retail to make a political point during this crisis—that our economy was weak—is wrong. We were strengthening our economy based on our policies. We were strengthening our budget. Isn't it a great thing that we went into this crisis with a budgetary position that was vastly better than virtually every other comparable nation. We had a debt to GDP ratio a quarter of what we see in places like the United States and the UK and about a seventh of what we see in places like Japan. That's no thanks to the Labor Party. We inherited a $48 billion deficit and we brought the budget back into balance. We saw unemployment coming down, with 1.5 million jobs being created. So that track record holds us in good stead.

But these are great and challenging times and, as a government, we are working with state and territory governments to deliver for the Australian people. Our absolute focus is on keeping Australian safe during this health crisis and protecting their livelihoods. As we open up our society again, we want to open up our economy as soon as it is safe to do so.

We hear the alternative approaches from the Labor Party. They want to permanently put government at the centre of our national life. We heard it again from the shadow finance minister today when she was critical of policies like cutting taxes. The shadow finance minister is critical of policies like cutting taxes!

Well, as we come out of this I think Australians can take great comfort from the way we have handled this crisis to date. As we continue to work together, we can bring our economy back to where it needs to be. It's not going to happen by government continuing to be at the centre of things. It's going to be small and medium and large enterprises getting on and creating jobs on behalf of all Australians. Those are the policies we're going to continue to pursue as we recover. (Time expired)

Comments

No comments