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

I thank the member for Corio for his question. Confidence is a central issue in the current economic circumstances facing Australia and indeed the rest of the world. That is confidence not just in wider business conditions but in particular in the strength and integrity of our regulators. It is also particularly important internationally, and that is reflected in decisions being made by international investors and financial institutions with respect to Australia. Those decisions are in turn reflected in things like the interest rates that they charge Australian financial institutions to borrow money from them—which in turn are reflected in things like interest rates that ordinary working people have to pay on their home loans, their credit cards and other financial products.

Confidence in the regulatory structure and confidence in the regulators is critical, particularly in the current circumstances where the government is facing very challenging circumstances as a result of the global financial crisis. Any suggestion that our regulators are not rigorous, are not impartial and that they allow politics to intrude into their decision making undermines confidence in the Australian regulatory arrangements both in this country and overseas. If you want to see examples of that, without naming them, all you need to do is have a look at one or two countries overseas where they have genuinely opaque, genuinely politicised regulatory arrangements and see what that does for confidence amongst international investors and international financial institutions.

Undermining confidence in our regulators seriously threatens the integrity of the Australian economy. The suggestion that the Australian Treasury has been involved in cooking the books, in publishing false forecasts and the suggestion that the Australian independent Reserve Bank has taken political decisions with respect to interest rates undermines world confidence and undermines Australian confidence in our economic regulators.

I am asked why these attacks are happening, why our regulators are being impugned and traduced, why the Secretary of the Treasury is being accused of lying, why he is being accused of cooking the books and why the Reserve Bank governor is being accused of manipulating interest rates for political purposes. The answer is straightforward: this is an orchestrated assault by the Liberal Party. It is according to a plan. It is according to a pattern. It is not a one-off event. It is according to an orchestrated plan on the part of the Liberal Party under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition, because the Liberal Party now represents the shonks, the spivs and the sharks who have all crawled out from under rocks as a result of the global financial crisis.

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