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

On 30 September the opposition leader said:

There is nobody that would have predicted these events a year ago or even a few months ago.

The following day, on 1 October, he said:

… events of the last few weeks would not have been predicted a few months ago.

So the position that the opposition leader is taking with respect to the government’s approach to the global financial crisis is that the government could not have known but it should have known. That is the net effect of his position—walking both sides of the street, saying that nobody could have known yet the government should have known. The opposition leader has in effect created a new category of soothsayer. Some people think they can see into the future. Well, he has gone one better: he can see into the past—absolutely sensational!

If I were the Leader of the Opposition, I would not focus too heavily on the past because, for example, he might discover that the government of which he was an integral player was advised no fewer than seven times over the course of the past seven years that it should consider enacting some kind of protection, some kind of insurance, for depositors in Australian banks and financial institutions. This advice came from, amongst others, the Financial Stability Forum, APRA, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the International Monetary Fund and the Council of Financial Regulators. So, if we were to look into the past, as the opposition leader seems to suggest, we might find that his recent posturing, his recent suggestion that the government was not doing enough to protect deposits in Australian banks, stands in stark contrast to the actions of his own government when confronted on numerous occasions by the key regulators in our economy with the proposal that something should be done on this and that nothing was indeed done by a government that he was an integral part of.

In conclusion, the opposition’s approach to dealing with the government’s economic security strategy is straightforward. It wants to be all things to all people. It wants to walk both sides of the street. It wants to make it up on the spot to support the individual payments, because it knows that they are well received in the community, but to undermine the overall strategy being put forward by of the government. It does not care. The Leader of the Opposition does not care whether what he says today is the direct opposite of what he said yesterday.

People in this country want clear, responsible, sound and consistent economic management and if you cannot deliver clear, responsible, sound and consistent economic policy in opposition, they will judge that you are not capable of delivering clear, sound and consistent management in government.

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