Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. I have not seen the detail of President Obama’s statement overnight and will be studying that in the period ahead. Can I say to the honourable member, however, that the President of the United States and I, in Washington and subsequently at the G20 summit in London, discussed on many occasions how we, as a G20, reform global financial markets and global financial systems and the regulatory environment which underpins them because, as the honourable member would know, in particular given his professional background, global capital is globally mobile and therefore the regulations that we need for the future need to be consistent across multiple nations, across multiple jurisdictions. Therefore that is why an extensive raft of reform proposals have been put to the Financial Stability Forum, as it was before—now the Financial Stability Board—that is headed by the Governor of the Central Bank of Italy, Governor Draghi.

Australia is represented on the Financial Stability Board and has recently had its representation enhanced from one position to two positions. As a consequence, through our representation on the Financial Stability Board, we will be working through with our colleagues from the G20, which now has a membership which parallels that of the Financial Stability Board, a raft of reform proposals which go to the questions of executive remuneration and financial markets as well as the proper provisioning for risk, the proper provisioning for capital adequacy and the proper provisioning for a whole range of other protections in financial markets. I would also draw the honourable member’s attention to the fact that the reason that we found ourselves in this extraordinary crisis—starting with the events of late last year and commencing in the United States much earlier than that—was that we had an outbreak of free-market fundamentalism in the United States with grossly unregulated markets and as a consequence of that we had the spread of this contagion across the world.

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