Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

What do we see from the Labor Party now? We see a Labor Party that's got no credibility. We've got a Labor Party that puts up the shadow Treasurer, who's failed in everything he's done, to then set bars and tests for this government that the Labor Party never met. As the Treasurer said in question time today, I understand the instinctive reaction of oppositions to be relentlessly negative. I understand that. An opposition feels the need to criticise the government of the day. An opposition feels the need to see bad things in everything that happens. But they should take the advice of that failed former Treasurer of theirs, Wayne Swan, when he said:

It is important that our political leaders work hard to build confidence in our economy and not be out there talking down the economy.

If you listened to the shadow Treasurer's speech here today, he would essentially go into any forum of a G7, where we've got a faster growing economy, and trash every single one of those economies based on the test that he set at this dispatch box. If you look at a whole range of other statistics—these are unarguable statistics—unemployment now is lower than when we came to government. Employment growth under the Labor Party was just 0.7 per cent. Now it's at two per cent—twice the OECD average.

This is what Labor don't understand. We believe that the first object of government, of course, is keeping our citizens safe and the second is doing everything we possibly can to create the environmental certainty and the economic circumstances for them to get a job. That's absolutely the most critical thing that a government can do. When the Labor Party were last in government and employment growth was 0.7 per cent and unemployment was at 5.7 per cent, I didn't hear Labor members criticising their own government. They are trying to rewrite history. We know the Labor Party are replete with people who write books about themselves. They're absolutely replete with former members who get a kick out of writing about themselves and genuflecting to the Labor Party. Not one of them apply the same test—

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