Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I most certainly am responding to the question, Mr Speaker, because what Mr Corbett is saying is what the government is saying—that is, that the government must do everything within its power to support employment. He went on to say:

“A package is needed and I think the community expects our governments operating in this crisis situation to act in a bipartisan way.”

That was very clearly directed at those opposite. Mr Corbett is a respected Australian businessman, but he is also somebody who has an enormous amount of economic knowledge and experience and, of course, is quite familiar to the member for Higgins—because Mr Corbett was appointed to the Reserve Bank board by the member for Higgins. So he is somebody whose views were once respected, at any rate, by those opposite. I guess what those quotes really demonstrate is one thing: how out of touch the opposition is with the scale of the challenge and the nature of the response that is required in this country, because we are in the middle of the sharpest synchronised contraction of the global economy in our lifetime.

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