Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

So the member for North Sydney says the Secretary of the Treasury’s position on this is only one voice and not to be trusted by the government. That is an extraordinary position on the part of those opposite. Can I say that the attitude of those opposite is also consistent with the previous government’s treatment of the Secretary of the Treasury. If those opposite perused the public reporting on this matter, when the current Secretary of the Treasury was serving the previous government and dared to give a public speech which went to the question of whether the Treasury was being properly consulted on such questions as water and climate change, how did the previous government deal with the then and current Secretary of the Treasury? Do you know what happened? His salary bonus was chopped because he dared to speak out. That is what happened. That is the contempt with which that government treated that high office of the Commonwealth.

When I as the Prime Minister turn to the Secretary of the Treasury and ask this formal question—‘Is this the advice of the regulators including the Reserve Bank?’—and the answer is yes, I trust that advice. I assume that the member for Wentworth backs up the Manager of Opposition Business when he says, ‘That’s just one voice’—one voice in the wilderness. It just happens to be the Secretary of the Treasury. Our view is quite the reverse.

I say to the member for Wentworth: you have a statement to us by the Secretary of the Treasury about the position of the regulators—that is point 1. But if there is any doubt on this matter it is an open and shut case when you have a statement today by the Governor of the Reserve Bank which says that the government’s actions were sensible and the Reserve Bank of Australia supported them. You have a clear-cut statement by the Reserve Bank governor that the bank supported the government’s actions consistent with the statement to the ministers in that committee about the attitude of the regulators to the action taken. The government’s course of action has been responsible, and again the member for Wentworth, the member for North Sydney, in a most irresponsible injection now about the Secretary of the Treasury, and the member—

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