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

I thank the member for Chifley for his question. The honourable member asks about preparations for the Pittsburgh summit. The Pittsburgh agenda will cover the implementation of government stimulus. It will cover also the question of the implementation of reforms to financial markets. It will also go to the question of the proper resourcing of the IMF and its long-term reform to help underpin long-term stability in global financial markets. It will also deal with, among other things, appropriate exit strategies in the medium term and the stimulus arrangements across the G20 economies. For the Australian economy this will be an important meeting—part of a long-term process of dealing with the global dimensions of what has been a fundamental assault on the global economy.

The honourable member also asks about certain statements being attributed to G20 leaders. In this House just now, we have had the opportunity to listen, in the suspension motion, to the Leader of the Opposition providing the parliament with a long lecture on the integrity of public administration, a long lecture on being responsible to the parliament, a long lecture on being accountable to the parliament, and I presume that also means being accountable for the integrity of the statements that you make to this parliament. Earlier in question time today, the member for North Sydney asked a question of the Treasurer and referred to a G20 member, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He said this in his question:

I refer the Treasurer to the remarks overnight of someone he keeps referencing—the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown—that his government would ‘cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programs and cut lower priority budgets to wind back the British fiscal stimulus.’

The member for North Sydney then went on to ask a question of the Treasurer. There is a problem with this. The British Prime Minister made no such statement. The text of the British Prime Minister’s statement, delivered to the Trade Union Congress yesterday—the relevant statement from which I presume the member for North Sydney has built his question—reads as follows:

Labour will cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets.

There is no reference to ‘to wind back the British fiscal stimulus.’ There is no reference to the British fiscal stimulus.

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