Tony Abbott to PM Gillard: Ease Down on Your Economic Lectures
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to focus on Australia's domestic affairs instead of issuing unsolicited advices to G20 member nations, specifically to the struggling economies of the eurozone.
In a speech Tuesday before the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), Mr Abbott said that Ms Gillard will better serve Australia's interest by delivering on the economic promises she had made before.
"The prime minister would be better advised to actually deliver a surplus as opposed merely to forecast one before she start giving lectures to other countries on economic and fiscal rectitude," the Liberal leader was reported as saying by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) in Canberra.
He reminded Ms Gillard that her government was not in the position to tell nations on how to manage their economies while she herself presided over a fiscal management that has so far resulted to four years of budget deficits for Australia.
Those successive deficits were so far the biggest the nation has seen, Mr Abbott noted.
Ms Gillard is attending the ongoing G20 summit in Mexico and has been vocal on her calls for euro leaders to decisively act on the region's crippling credit crisis, insisting that economies must embrace fiscal discipline while rolling out policies that would encourage economic growth.
The prime minister pointed out that the region's financial institutions need further consolidation and recapitalisation, which she stressed should spark the needed turnaround pace for a number of economies in the region.
Ms Gillard has been making an example of how the Labor-led government had managed to insulate the Australian economy during the worst period of the global financial crisis in 2008 while stimulating relative growth at the same time, which is credited on the current healthy state of the domestic economy.
Mr Abbott, however, noted that Australia has a solid economy because governments before the Labor rule were prudent enough to institute reforms that created the present economic environment.
The same settings also encouraged the resource boom, which has become the pillar of the Australian economy, that all started, Mr Abbott said, prior to the ascent of Labor's Kevin Rudd and now Ms Gillard.
Ms Gillard's assertions have so far raised brows from European leaders, with European Union President Herman Van Rompuy declaring in a statement that the raging crisis in the region "will take time to solve."
"There are no quick fixes, no silver bullets, but we will do all it takes to see it through," Mr Van Rompuy was quoted by AAP as saying.
Also, the European Commission leadership has allowed that ideas and suggestions are welcomed by G20 members but the summit, according to EC Chief Jose Manuel Barroso, seems not the appropriate platform for issuing lectures.
Mr Barroso told AAP that the euro crisis was not exclusive to the region and a problem that would impact on economies around the world.
He added that what ails Europe now was partly due to the crisis that hit the United States in 2008, which he stressed drove many key economies into recession or near-recession state.