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

When the Treasurer introduced the Financial Claims Scheme into the parliament on, I think, Wednesday of last week, the Treasurer made it absolutely clear at that time that the interrelationship between the Financial Claims Scheme on the one hand—that is, the guarantee on bank deposits—and the guarantees for term wholesale funding on the other would be coordinated in the implementation arrangements between both the bank and the Treasury and others, and that is the process which has unfolded over the last week or so, as is normal. The Treasurer indicated that was the process. We have had the regulators at work on this process. That is the normal thing to do because there are complex negotiations on implementation between not only the regulators, on the one hand, including the Treasury, but also the banks themselves and also relevant international jurisdictions. So these matters will be resolved and published in their finality when these deliberations by the regulators with the banks are concluded. That is the proper way to do things, and that is what we indicated when the Treasurer introduced his legislation last week. Can I say this to the Leader of the Opposition, who finds this entire exercise entirely amusing: the basic facts are these. The government acted decisively in the middle of a financial crisis. Secondly, what happened was that we took action to—

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