Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

We are all aware of the global crisis and we are hearing and reading about many of the issues. In the last day, this parliament has been discussing some of those issues. The point that I make today is not really to get into the debate about the bills but to issue a warning to both sides of parliament that we should not rush this debate. The member for North Sydney made an important point earlier, and the Prime Minister has made the same point: this is a very significant and crucial issue. This nation has never before been where it is at, and the last thing that the people in the community want is the game being played as if it were just another traditional political issue where the two sides face each other and the one with the numbers wins. That is not going to deliver confidence within the community.

Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have talked about confidence and fear, and the contributors to this debate in the last few minutes have talked about those same issues. What this needs is a parliament that actually deliberates on the issues in a constructive sense rather than on the politics of the issues. The country does not need references to Whitlam; it does not need those references back to the seventies. This is a different issue. What it does need is both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to look very seriously at what is actually happening here. We all know that the Prime Minister does not have all the answers. We all know that no-one on the globe really knows what is going to happen in terms of this financial collapse. So there will be mistakes made—and I am sure that, in this package that the government is trying to rush through the parliament, there will be some mistakes. On the surface, I will be supportive of the legislation. But there are areas that need proper scrutiny—not political scrutiny and references to debt-ridden and debt-addicted Labor and Whitlam on steroids, or whatever the reference was. I do not think that does anything to enhance confidence within the community about the parliament actually trying to come to grips with solving an issue.

We have two houses of parliament. The government does not control the Senate. But I think it would be in the interests of the government to slow down on this issue and actually have the debate about these critical issues—not in a political sense, where you gag it at three o’clock in the morning because you have got the numbers; that would be the worst thing that could be done in terms of this issue. This is a lot of money. These are, in my view, serious attempts by government to address some of these issues through money going into a whole range of areas—including schools, local government and the community—and obviously the various tax and investment allowances and so on that are built into it. In addition to that, we have got climate change issues. They all send significant signals to the community. But the signal that is coming out of this place now is one not of unity but of ‘the game is the same’.

Everybody is suggesting, and I think the general public feel, that this is an issue that they do not understand. There were a lot of institutions that we trusted globally, a lot of people we trusted globally in terms of their economic theories and the way in which they developed confidence in various policies that governments around the world put in place. Take Alan Greenspan—most of us thought that he knew everything that was going on, but now he has apologised.

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