Mr CREAN (2:06 PM) —My question is to the Treasurer and it follows his earlier answer. Treasurer, how can you claim it is good news when you have just presided over the biggest recorded monthly fall in full-time employment ever: a fall of 79,200 jobs last month? What do you say to the 160,000 workers who have lost their full-time jobs since your GST came in last July? What do you say to the hundreds of small business people being forced to the wall because of your job destroying GST? Treasurer, if everyone has never had it so good, why are so many Australians and their families missing out?

Mr COSTELLO (Treasurer) —If the Labor Party really believed the GST was the author of such havoc on the Australian economy, they would have pledged to repeal it. I have never really understood this point that, on the one hand, the Labor Party would have you believe that the GST has caused havoc in the fastest growing economy in the world, most probably caused an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom and most probably is responsible for Mount Etna erupting, but, if they ever get elected to office, what do they want to do? They want to keep it. Every time you ask them about the extent of roll-backwards and say, `GST raises $24 billion. Will you commit yourself to rolling backwards 50 per cent, or $12 billion?' they say, `No, it's not $12 billion.' If we say, `Will you commit to rolling backwards one-third of the way?' they say, `No, we wouldn't commit to that.' Roll-backwards—the policy which dare not speak its name—disappears by the minute. In the half-world of shadow and fantasy that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition exists in, roll-backwards is the policy that is required but can never actually be revealed.

In relation to the labour force, let us put some facts on the table. The Australian unemployment rate is currently at 6.9 per cent, down from its peak of 10.9 per cent in December 1992, when the employment minister was the now Leader of the Opposition. Over the course of the five years since this government was elected in March 1996, there have been a net new 805,000 jobs created in the Australian economy. Youth unemployment has come down from the all-time high of 34.5 per cent in July 1992, when Mr Beazley was the employment minister, to a rate now of 24 per cent. As I said, we have made some substantial progress in relation to unemployment. We have undone a lot of Labor's damage. But have we finished? No, of course there is more work to be done in relation to unemployment.

What do we have to do? We need a strong economy, and the Australian economy is holding up well compared with all of the economies of the developed world. More than that, we need labour market reform, because nothing would be better to bring down structural unemployment than labour market reform. I pay tribute to the work that has been done, but more labour market reform needs to be done. The third thing I say is this: if you were really interested in people maintaining their jobs in Australia, would you support the irresponsible union action that put 10,000 people out of work last week? The one thing we never heard from the Labor Party was a condemnation of a strike that threw 10,000 fellow Australians out of work. The Manufacturing Workers Union, affiliated to the ACTU, threw 10,000 Australians out of work last week, and the old ACTU president could not bring himself to condemn it.

The Labor Party, if they get elected at the next election, will have three living former ACTU presidents on their front bench and a few dead ex-ACTU presidents sitting on their front bench, too. Who would ever believe that they could take a strong stand on labour market reform? Who would ever believe that they could support the kind of reform that is necessary to create real jobs for real people in this country?