Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has today demonstrated that he is either economically illiterate or just addicted to deceiving the Australian people with his latest outrageous claim that the Australian economy is not growing.
Mr Abbott told reporters today that:
"Now, at the heart of what I offer to the Australian people is a return to economic growth."
(Doorstop, 20 September 2012)
The problem with Mr Abbott's 'return to economic growth' strategy is that Australia has not stopped growing for the past two decades - 21 years of consecutive growth, in fact.
Mr Abbott is either unaware of this fact or he is being deliberately misleading in his latest attempt to talk down the Australian economy.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Mr Abbott doesn't know that Australia has had 21 consecutive years of growth - he has previously confessed that he is bored by economics and even fell asleep and failed to vote during the Parliamentary debate on the stimulus package in the midst of the GFC.
Unlike most other advanced economies, Australia didn't fall into recession during the global financial crisis thanks to the Labor Government's successful stimulus, together with the hard work and resilience of the Australian people.
As a result around 800,000 more Australians are in work since this Government came to office, while in the United States around 5 million people have lost their jobs. And while major economies like the UK, Japan, France and Italy haven't even made up the ground they lost during the GFC, the Australian economy is 11 per cent larger today than it was when this Government came to office.
Mr Abbott needs to stop talking down the Australian economy and start paying attention to the facts.