Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Forde for his question. Decisions and statements by government do influence the actions of investors and consumers and it is therefore vital that economic ministers and the government do act and speak responsibly and accurately. It is also, of course, natural that this test should be applied to those who aspire to run the nation’s finances. Unfortunately, the new shadow minister for finance, Senator Joyce, has demonstrated on a number of occasions since he got the appointment from the Leader of the Opposition a serious lack of understanding or, indeed, accuracy in his statements. This demonstrates a very big question mark over the judgment of the Leader of the Opposition in appointing him in the first place, a very big question mark about the opposition’s capacity to manage the economy and the budget, and it does suggest that the election of an Abbott government would be a serious risk to the future prosperity of Australia.

I would just like to refer to a couple of the statements that Senator Joyce has made. He warned in December of the prospect of ‘economic Armageddon’ citing the threat to essential medicines and foods. He suggested that the United States might default on its debts. He suggested that various Australian state governments might default on their debts. He called for Australia’s major banks to be broken up. More recently, he has opposed Chinese investment in Australian companies, and today he said that Australia cannot afford an increase in the minimum wage, which of course has been frozen for some time as a result of the most recent decision of the Minimum Wage Panel of Fair Work Australia.

Had some of these statements been made by a finance minister, the ramifications for Australia could have been very serious, particularly were they to be made at a time of great economic crisis and stress such as this nation went through in the latter part of 2008 and for much of 2009—the global financial crisis. Some of these statements would have been front page news in newspapers all around the world, would have certainly undermined our relationship with the United States, would have called into question the state of the global economy and would have done enormous damage to Australia’s standing with investors both in this country and internationally. I would suggest that, when the Australian finance minister stands up and says that state governments may default, anybody with any sense of understanding of economics on that side—and there are very few—would understand that this poses a real threat to the stability of the Australian economy.

I know there is a tendency to dismiss Senator Joyce as something of an entertaining sideshow. He is now in a very different league. It appears that he has effectively taken over as the No. 1 spokesman on the economy from the opposition. We know from Niki Savva’s book that the Leader of the Opposition said to the former Treasurer Peter Costello that he was bored with economics. He was quoted in a newspaper article that he found it boring and, for that reason, Peter Costello indicated that he would rule out the Leader of the Opposition as a prospective deputy were he to become leader.

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