Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister’s response to the opposition in this parliament has been to say, ‘Get out of the road, get out of the way.’ He has said there is no alternative to his proposal. Yet we all know, as the Prime Minister has said today in another context and as I have said in this and many other contexts, that none of us, not one of us, is the repository of all wisdom on this or any other issue. But we have a Prime Minister who in his hubris chose to present a package of spending that represents an enormous percentage of GDP, will impose an enormous debt on our children and will result in our children and their children paying high taxes in the years ahead to fund a cheque for $950 to almost every Australian. In other words, he is asking this parliament to approve measures which will see billions of dollars being mailed out to Australians for current expenditure today—all of which, every cent of which, is being borrowed from the next generation.

The Prime Minister is right and we have all been right when we have said that we are not the repositories of all wisdom, and that is why we have set out an indication of the type of stimulus we would support, of the type of package we would support. And we have sought to sit down with the government.

The Prime Minister has said that every mainstream economist in Australia supports his spending package. He has implied therefore that any economist who does not support it is not a mainstream economist. Well, one of the leading economists in the world is Dr Warwick McKibbin. He is a member of the board of the Reserve Bank. Does the Prime Minister regard the Reserve Bank as part of the economic mainstream? Does he regard the board members of the Reserve Bank as part of the economic mainstream? There you have just one example, and there are many others, of economists and experts who are questioning the effectiveness of this spending package. What did Dr McKibbin say? He said the package is too big; we are spending too much money at this time. Henry Ergas, another leading economist, described it by saying that the package was ‘too much, too early’.

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