Ms GAMBARO (4:30 PM) —I am pleased to support the Minister for Financial Services and Regulation, and I am quite surprised that the member for Kingston has come in and actually spoken about fiscal and monetary policy. It was quite interesting today to see an article about the previous speaker in the Financial Review. It states:

And I notice his past career is stated at the bottom of the article:

That was the worst period of fiscal irresponsibility that this country has ever been through. It is really rich of you to come in here today and lecture us about fiscal and monetary responsibility when you presided over a period that produced this country's worst fiscal history. It is absolutely shameful what you did to the Australian economy. It was your pitiful attempts at social and fiscal reform that made those years absolutely abysmal. You come in here and speak to us about the economy, you come in here and tell us how our performance rated, but let me set a few facts straight.

Seeing as the former speaker does rank himself as an economist of some sort, I am very happy to give him the record of his party's achievements in government, which he knows only too well. When you left government in 1996, 1.9 million people were living in poverty, including nearly 600,000 children aged under 15 years. Between 1976 and 1992, the number of households in Australia earning between $22,000 and $72,000 a year declined from 62 to 57 per cent, and the number of people earning less than $22,000 doubled from 15 to 30 per cent. You also made some wonderful promises back then that you would take all age and service pensions out of the tax system—this was just before the 1993 election—and you reneged on that promise as well. But your fiscal record is really what we are here to speak about today, and I am happy to turn back the clock and reiterate the situation that you left us with in 1996.

In 1996, when we came into government, we found out that we had a deficit of $10 billion, which was left by the Labor Party, and 1999-2000 will be our third surplus in a row. One of the things that we did do was introduce the Charter of Budget Honesty, which means that the tragic events of the past will never occur again. If Labor had remained in office, they would have taken Australia into even greater debt, and we would have been in an increasingly poor position both domestically and internationally, and I want to talk about that. In 1991-92 and 1995-96, you accumulated a deficit of $69 billion. The member for Kingston did not speak about that earlier. In the last two years of the Labor government, we had a cumulative budget deficit of $23.3 billion. It was shameful.

This government has introduced a framework to ensure that there is good and correct conduct of monetary policy and recognises the Reserve Bank's independent role in endorsing this policy and also in its inflation objective. You quoted the Reserve Bank earlier. I am a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration, and I do attend the hearings quite regularly, I am happy to say. I have a very different story from the last hearing when the Governor of the Reserve Bank came before the committee and spoke of monetary policy, which is what we are here to talk about. He spoke of our great achievements, and when he appeared before us again he said:

which I think was 29 November—

He then went on to talk about growing incomes, sustained high levels of confidence, low borrowing costs, wealth gains over a range of assets, a recovery in the housing sector and the prospect of increased investment spending over the next 12 months. The Reserve Bank governor is a pretty good judge of things to come. I got some information sent to me by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, `Survey of investor confidence for April 2000'. That survey of investor confidence says that the economy may have peaked as business conditions eased slightly in the April quarter 2000 and that the index is now at 63.8 per cent. So that says there is great recovery and great confidence, and the business sector described general business conditions as good or better. It went on to say that 62.5 per cent of respondents indicated that overall business conditions are good or better, while 11.6 per cent of the survey indicated that conditions were poor or worse, and they are mirroring exactly what the Reserve Bank governor had to say. Further on in the report, the Reserve Bank governor said:

I know the members opposite do not like to hear good news, and some of the members from the opposition who were there for the two days of hearings did everything to try to get the Reserve Bank governor to admit that the economy was in terrible shape, but every statement or comment he made showed the financial responsibility of this government and our great performance. I know the member earlier was talking about the world economy and other factors around the world, so I will quote another extract from this report where the Reserve Bank governor was asked about the weak performance in the world economy in 1998. He said:

I would like to quote some more figures for the benefit of opposition members. I would like to bring them back to interest rates when they were in government. Variable mortgage interest rates are at 7.55 per cent, and they are still at historic lows. This compares with the peak when you were in government of 17 per cent, and business rates were 20 per cent—they were absolutely shameful in 1989. A lot of businesses went broke because of financial irresponsibility. Inflation averaged 5.2 per cent and unemployment reached 11.2 per cent. At the moment we have the best growth figures: four per cent throughout the year terms for 11 consecutive quarters since June 1997. We have the longest consecutive period of growth: four per cent or more since the June quarter of 1968 and the March quarter of 1971. Inflation has been at an all-time low of 1.1 per cent under the coalition compared with 5.2 per cent under Labor. These inflation levels are the lowest that we have had since 1960. Unemployment continues to improve, and we have an unemployment rate that is less than seven per cent—the lowest in 10 years—compared with 8.5 per cent when we were elected. Your record was just disgraceful then. Productivity growth averaged 2.6 per cent per annum under the coalition compared with an average of 1.5 per cent under Labor.

In relation to our international responsibility, we were recently upgraded by Standard and Poor's from a AA rating to a AA+ rating. The International Monetary Fund said of Australia in February this year:

It noted that our performance reflected the `sustained commitment to sound macro-economic policies and ongoing structural reforms'. The Labor Party does not want to hear all this great news. One of the other indicators and comments was from Dr Paul Krugman from MIT who said that there are not enough Australian economies in the world. An article in the Economist of 7 September said:

The word—I point out to the member for Kingston—is we `thrived', and we will continue to thrive. The government have gone through the Asian economic crisis. They have returned the budget to surplus. We have reduced unemployment, and we have introduced reforms that will take Australia into the 21st century proudly.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Jenkins)—Order! I just remind the member for Petrie to in future refer her remarks through the chair. The chair was quite happy not to have such a fragile hide that all the `yous' that were used were taken personally. I did not think that I should interrupt the honourable member on this occasion, but I hope she understands and in future refers her remarks through the chair. The discussion has concluded.

Ms Gambaro —I apologise to the chair.