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

What is really disturbing is that there is a falsehood at the heart of this question. That falsehood is this: that we support the IMF with loans, which are always repaid with interest. The Leader of the Opposition asked me if I was confident that the Europeans were going to solve their problems. I have been to G20 finance ministers meetings, I have been to the IMF and World Bank meetings, I have been back to G20 finance ministers meetings in the past month, and that is because we have been so worried about the consequences for the global economy of a meltdown in the European economy. What offends me by those questions from the Leader of the Opposition is he has not got the wit to understand what a threat that is to global living standards and what a flow-on effect that will have to our economy and to living standards in this country. He is so bereft of economic knowledge he fails to understand that basic economic fact.

What he wants to do is to go for cheap populism and somehow claim that we are going to be throwing good money after bad in Europe. We are not going to be doing that, but what we will do is meet our obligations to the international community, as we met the obligations to the international community during the global financial crisis and as we met the obligations to our own citizens during the global financial crisis. There would have been hundreds of thousands of Australians unemployed if the Liberal Party had had their way during the global financial crisis, but we supported our economy and the consequence of that is that we have one of the strongest developed economies in the world. Really, what he is saying now is that he goes for the scorched earth approach in economics; he does not care if demand falls off a cliff and hundreds of thousands of people are unemployed. Globally now there are over 200 million people unemployed and, if these events in Europe take a turn for the worse, there will be many more. We know in this country that we have the economic strength to handle the fallout and we have the moral strength to say that we will put our hand up for the international institutions that can make a difference. We will support the IMF, as we will support multilateral institutions as governments of their persuasions used to do.

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