Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors, Tourism and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I will educate the member at the table as well. Let us explore how this actually happened. There was a left-of-centre President of the United States by the name of Bill Clinton, who in 1991 was merrily issuing press releases left, right and centre claiming how wonderful it was that his left-of-centre interventionist government was going to ensure that lower socioeconomic people in American society would be able to access housing credit. They boasted it from the hilltops. The United States President was making sure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make credit available to those who would not ordinarily be able to get the credit. That is where it all started. Do not blame the Wall Street crowd. If you want to blame anyone, put the blame back where it started, which was the United States President, Bill Clinton, when he instructed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to give money to those people who ordinarily would not be able to apply for it. So, if they want to know where the subprime crisis started, let them look a little further, let them dig a little deeper and let them extend their brainpower a little bit further to understand where it actually came from, which was a no doubt well-intentioned, left-of-centre, interventionist government that thought that it knew best.

Any time this left-of-centre crowd starts thinking that they know better than the market, we see the implications of their decisions. The more that we see these interventionists stick their noses into the marketplace, the more we see the long-term consequences of their decisions. It is that same kind of flawed logic where the government thinks that it knows best. It stepped in to ensure that it would fix the bank guarantee problem, and we saw all the consequences flow as a result of that intervention as well.

Increasingly, despite the rhetoric of the Prime Minister, who talks about ‘extreme capitalism’ and ‘extreme greed’ and all of these kinds of things, we actually know that the people the Australian people should be most afraid of are those well-intentioned interventionists from left-of-centre governments who take a bad problem and make it so very much worse. In the same way that that has occurred in the United States, it is now unfortunately occurring here in Australia. The coalition certainly supports the notion of there being an economic stimulus package. I am pleased that there is money going towards pensioners, carers, Commonwealth seniors health card holders, veterans, families and some first home buyers, but what is clear is that, in the same way that this government has form when it comes to making a bad problem much worse—for example, the bank guarantee—this government’s attempts to blow half the budget surplus in one fell swoop with no economic modelling is very likely to make a bad problem much worse. I look forward to hearing what the government’s response will be.

See this speech in context