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

Australia is facing very powerful downward pressures on our economy from the global financial crisis and the knock-on consequences that are beginning to ripple through the global economy, and Australia is not immune from the influences that are emerging from this trend. The government has taken decisive action in response to these developments to push back against those downward pressures on the Australian economy, particularly by injecting a $10 billion economic security strategy stimulus into economic activity but also by guaranteeing bank deposits and guaranteeing wholesale lending to Australian banks and financial institutions in order to ensure that their activity can continue, and these are of course added to the stimulatory impact that is already beginning to flow from interest rate reductions by the Reserve Bank and the decline in the value of the Australian dollar. The impact of these things of course does not flow instantaneously but it does gradually move throughout the economy.

It is vital that this strategy does receive broad support from within the community and it is important that people do not talk down the Australian economy. I note with some interest that the opposition appears to be trying to have it both ways on this issue. It wants to have people believe that it supports the government’s economic security strategy and it wants to have people believe that it supports the payments that are being made to pensioners, to carers and to families as part of that strategy; yet, at the same time, it wants to unpick that strategy and it wants to convince Australians that that strategy is actually bad economic policy. It wants to walk both sides of the street. It wants to both support the package and attack it at the same time.

In the opposition leader’s address to the nation, he made the following statements:

With the benefit of hindsight, government should have acted a lot earlier.

And:

… Mr Rudd’s government missed the warning signs at the beginning of the year—

about the global financial crisis. This statement stands in stark contrast to earlier statements, only very recent, by the Leader of the Opposition. On 30 September he said:

There is nobody—

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