Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

The point I was making before this latest very rude interruption is that the opposition leader has occupied a range of positions on every aspect of the global financial crisis and on every aspect of the Rudd government’s response. He started quite early on by saying that ‘Kevin Rudd has hyped up this crisis’. Here is the opposition leader saying that the whole financial crisis has been hyped up by the Prime Minister of Australia, yet one day later the opposition leader had this to say:

… it is undoubtedly a very grave, the gravest global financial crisis that we’ve seen since the Great Depression …

So one day he says the whole global financial crisis has been ‘hyped up’ by the Prime Minister of Australia—who caused the global financial crisis in Europe and in the United States, who caused these countries to go into recession!—and the next day this is ‘the gravest global financial crisis we have seen since the Great Depression’. Then he went on to say this:

… these are huge convulsions, financial and economic convulsions around the world of a kind very few, only people really who were, you know, alive during the Great Depression would have seen financial changes the equal of this.

This is from the same Leader of the Opposition who said it was all hyped up. So that is his position on the overall global financial crisis.

How many different positions has the opposition leader occupied on anticipating the global financial crisis? Well, as in every other case, many different positions. He said that nobody could have seen the global financial crisis coming. That was on 30 September. He said:

There is nobody that would have predicted these events a year ago or even a few months ago.

Then he said on 15 October—

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