Chris Pearce (Aston, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in the House this afternoon to speak to this very important matter of public importance. It is in times like these that the Australian people need a government that is in control and a government that, above everything else, can instil confidence—confidence in our country and confidence in our financial system going forward. Australians need that confidence because they themselves need confidence in their own future. They need confidence so that they can make their everyday life decisions. They need confidence so they can invest in themselves and their families and their businesses, if they happen to own and operate a business, for their long term. So being a government, particularly an Australian government, is a great responsibility.

Instead of us having the fortune of having a government that is instilling confidence across our economy, we have instead Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, and Labor overall working as hard as they can in every way possible to undermine that confidence across our entire country. They have undermined that confidence through a series of different things that have been done in recent days. The first is that they have undermined that confidence by, if you like, undermining themselves and our key economic regulators, such as the Reserve Bank of Australia. They have undermined the RBA, they have undermined the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and they have undermined the Australian Securities and Investments Commission by not consulting directly with those regulators. Instead they have led the Australian people down the path to a perception that they are walking hand in glove with those regulators, when in fact in the House yesterday we learnt from the Prime Minister the revelation that he has not been talking to those regulators directly. They have also undermined that confidence by undermining key officials within the Treasury department—none other than the Secretary of the Treasury. He has been hung out to dry big time by Kevin Rudd. And, of course, they have undermined confidence in our country by ignoring the parliament and ignoring the parliamentary process through their contemptuous and pernicious attitude to debate and transparency in this very important democratic institution of parliament.

The issues of confidence and certainty, as I am sure you would appreciate, Madam Deputy Speaker, are critical matters. They are critical because we need confidence and certainty in order for the stability of our financial system to go forward. I want to very briefly cite a couple of examples in the media today and yesterday that go to this area of the undermining by the government of confidence and certainty. In the Australian today, Dennis Shanahan says:

At a time of need for the utmost confidence and certainty, a decision of fundamental importance to Australian financial and economic stability was rushed without due consideration.

An article in the Financial Review today indicates how this government has undermined confidence and certainty in the market:

The country’s largest mortgage fund, the $2.9 billion Challenger Howard Mortgage Fund, and the—

associated—

$40 million Challenger Mortgage Plus Trust stopped daily withdrawals yesterday after the AFR reported ... a hefty increase in full redemption as nervous investors flocked to the safety of big banks.

‘Nervous investors’. Why are they nervous? They are nervous because this government is undermining the confidence and the certainty in our markets.

An article in the Age today says that there has been a run on the Macquarie Cash Management Trust. And yesterday a respected economic and business journalist, Terry McCrann, said in the Daily Telegraph:

He—

that is, Kevin Rudd—

trashed the fundamental framework for managing the economy that has prevailed over the past 12 to 15 years.

There you have four examples of how this government is going about undermining the confidence and certainty in our financial system.

What should be happening is that the government should be going about its business in a steady, reliable and confidence-building manner. But of course we have nothing more—and this has been demonstrated very much in this place over the last couple of days—than what could only be described, in the kindest possible way, as an erratic, panic-stricken and clearly befuddled government that is making policy on the run. Let’s just look at the most recent backflips that we have got from Kevin 747—

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