Mr SWAN (3:13 PM) —My question is to the Treasurer. I ask whether he recalls claiming credit for a fall in interest rates of 0.25 per cent on 2 December 1998. He said:

If the Treasurer is prepared to claim credit when interest rates fall, why won’t he accept responsibility now that they have increased a total of seven times since April 2002?

Mr COSTELLO (Treasurer) —Interest rates today are substantially lower than they were when the government was elected in 1996. Today the standard variable mortgage interest rate is 7.8 per cent but, as the Reserve Bank says, you can get rates lower than that. The standard variable mortgage interest rate when the government was elected was 10½ per cent. It was at 17 per cent.

The Leader of the Opposition was going to draw the line under the Keating policy in a widely advertised speech in North Queensland leaked out to the newspapers. Here was going to be the final repudiation of the Keating high interest rate policy. One problem: when he got to actually read the speech, he could not pronounce the word ‘Keating’ and he left it out as a consequence. The Australian Labor Party is complicit in the economic failures of Paul Keating and the government in which he was Treasurer. The Australian Labor Party never had the wit to actually balance the budget. In 1998 we passed a very significant milestone. In 1998 we got the Australian budget back into balance, something that had evaded Keating, something that had evaded the then Minister for Finance, who has run up something like $60 billion of accumulated deficits. Where would Australia be today if this government had not decided to balance the budget and to repay Labor debt? Australia is much stronger as a consequence, and let it never be forgotten that the Labor Party fought and opposed us every step of the way.