Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

First, the Liberal opposition say that they are for low taxes, but it would appear that some taxes are more equal than others. They are in favour of tax relief when some taxes are under consideration but not other taxes. Taxes that pay for subsidies to the private health insurance sector clearly have a different status to other kinds of taxes when it comes to their attitude to tax relief. Second, we have seen the Liberal opposition attack the Reserve Bank. So much for Reserve Bank independence which, when they were in government, they loudly trumpeted. Now it is open season on the Reserve Bank at a time of great international turmoil and great economic difficulty for Australia.

Third, the opposition have been very happy to spread fear and uncertainty, asking questions, for example, about the financial stability and strength of Medibank Private and of private health insurance—all without any evidence of anything wrong or without any basis for claiming that there was something fundamentally wrong with the balance sheets or the circumstances of those organisations. Fourth, and perhaps most bizarrely of all, they have claimed credit for interest rate reductions. It is as if they have not lost the election. They still have not quite got out of that mode of promising interest rates at record lows; they have never quite left that zone. Now they are claiming credit when interest rates are actually reduced. They have not worked out that they have actually swapped sides; they are now the opposition.

I note that the member for North Sydney was the main culprit in this regard. I note that he, in the same breath as doing this, was triumphantly pointing out to people that in March he warned of a recession and he has now been vindicated. That was the thrust of his comments the other day. It kind of reminded me, for those of you who are as old as me, of the famous incident in, I think, the 1966 grand final, with broadcaster Mike Williamson saying: ‘I tipped this, Butch! I tipped this!’ The member for North Sydney is now triumphantly parading around saying: ‘Oh, it looks like there’s going to be a recession. I was right!’ I think he is getting a little bit ahead of himself and I think it is a little bit distasteful for leading figures in the opposition to in effect be claiming that they were right that Australia is going to have a recession. I think it illustrates how thin, how threadbare, the claims to bipartisanship are that he is looking to score points in that regard.

Finally, I turn to the comments made in the moving speech by the Leader of the Opposition. I notice that he claimed—and this claim has been made before—that the government, in its first tranche of $4 billion of investment through the Australian Office of Financial Management, was adopting an idea put forward by him which we had claimed was a gaffe. In fact, he is actually verballing himself because, in his interview with Laurie Oakes, he did not quite say what he is now pretending he said. In fact, he suggested we do what the authorities in the United States had been doing, which was in effect to buy up existing dud mortgages. We of course rejected this proposition, and gradually he moved his view away from that in the ensuing days when he realised what a gaffe he had made.

Secondly, I note that the Leader of the Opposition had the hide to suggest that the former government would have acted on deposit guarantees last year but they decided that it would have sent the wrong signal. So, in other words, they did not do it but now, retrospectively, they are telling us: ‘We would have done it, but we thought it was all a bit hard.’ Finally, Terry McCrann, probably the premier business journalist in Australia, who is by no means a left-wing or pro-Labor commentator, made observations on the Leader of the Opposition in respect of interest rates in an article on 8 October:

OK, I’ll take Malcolm Turnbull at his word. The Opposition Leader really is an idiot and doesn’t understand how financial markets work.

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There’s a bigger worry than Turnbull just making an idiot of himself. Again, he apparently doesn’t understand that we are living in extremely—

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