Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Sure—by 'the Treasurer'. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I called him 'Dr Chalmers', because he has got a doctorate, but I take your advice.

I'm reading from the Sydney Morning Herald article:

The Coalition initially supported the move, but in recent months has raised fears Chalmers would "sack and stack" the new committee. It had demanded all members of the current board be moved to the new committee.

Chalmers had agreed to this, but also said he would not move a board member if they preferred to shift to the governance board.

I know that the member for Hume, the shadow Treasurer, has said that the RBA had been undermined by the Treasurer, who last week said high interest rates have smashed the economy, trying to deflect attention from the government's role in the country's inflation. Of course the shadow Treasurer is right in that regard. We previously considered this bill very carefully, but it was agreed that the coalition would continue to engage in good faith with the government. But, unfortunately, the government is now not acting in good faith with either us, the coalition, as the opposition or with the RBA.

You cannot have senior members of government—and journalists don't generally make these things up—describing members of the RBA as nutters or weirdos or barbarians. That is unacceptable, completely unacceptable. In August, the Treasurer wrote to the shadow Treasurer with some proposed amendments. The government's amendments leave open the option for a complete stitch-up of the RBA board. Following this and what I would say are extraordinary interventions of the Treasurer and his surrogates in just the past week, the coalition will not be supporting this bill.

Indeed, this particular legislation implements what the government said that it was going to do with the 2023 RBA review, but it goes too far. What will happen is that we will be seeing more and more intervention by the government into the independence of the RBA. We have a situation where the government has overseen huge increases in inflation, and then we have these incendiary comments by the Treasurer about how the RBA is smashing the economy. Then he was crab-walking back from that in question time, where he repeatedly talked about $1 trillion of Liberal Party debt.

First of all, it's nowhere near $1 trillion dollars. I see the member for Griffith agreeing with me. It's not often that the member for Griffith and I agree, but it's not $1 trillion. It's not more than $1 trillion either, Member for Griffith. It's nowhere near that. It's also not just the Liberal Party that actually did the job during COVID; it was the Liberal and the National parties together. In exchange for the debt that the nation found itself in, we saved tens of thousands of Australian lives at a time when the Chief Medical Officer of this nation, Dr Brendan Murphy, had said that we would lose, if something wasn't done, tens of thousands of Australian lives within weeks, if not months. We acted, and we did everything we could under bizarre, unique circumstances.

The world had not seen a pandemic like this since the end of the First World War. The First World War ended in 1918, and the pandemic of 1919-20 took the lives of many people. COVID-19 threatened to wipe out so many people off the face of this earth, and, indeed, it did. In fact, it killed millions. They were piling up coffins in churches because the morgues were filled in Italy. They were burying people in mass graves on Manhattan Island in the United States of America. They are two countries with good health systems.

We were faced with the prospect of what to do as a nation. We shut the borders. We put in place the National Cabinet; it worked well at the start. We put in place logistics. We put in place methods to get vaccines across the nation and throughout the Pacific. Not only did we save tens of thousands of Australian lives, but we also saved millions of jobs through JobKeeper.

Then we get the Treasurer of Australia standing up and saying, 'Well, what did we get for the trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt?' He should stop saying that because it's just not true. What we got was the second-best rating in all of the world from the Johns Hopkins centre, that institute which measured pandemic preparedness and pandemic reaction. We should be very proud of what we did because there are people today alive who would not have been so but for the actions that we took.

But Labor is growing more and more desperate. Attacks on the RBA are as unnecessary as they are unwarranted. Of course, when the Treasurer blames the RBA for 'smashing the economy', we see a very desperate Treasurer almost akin to the naughty schoolboy who didn't do his homework and who, when he comes to class and the teacher asks where the homework is, says, 'Well, the dog ate the homework,' the dog in this instance being the RBA for just doing its job. Michele Bullock is doing her job. She's doing the job she was asked to do and was put in place by this government to do.

What we're seeing is rampant inflation. What we're seeing is an economy that is not supporting business. Each and every day I go into my country communities in the Riverina and the Central West and I see more shops putting up 'Closed' or 'Closing down' signs in their windows. We see more and more people sleeping in their cars. We see tents appearing in places where people simply cannot afford either rent or their own home or other accommodation. What we're getting is a Treasurer blaming the Reserve Bank governor and the Reserve Bank board and then wanting to change the rules so that the government can sack the said board and do a complete job on the Reserve Bank board. This is just unheard of and unparalleled.

Then what we find is that the government wants to do a deal with the Greens, and here they are—the economic strategists of the nation.

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