Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on preparations for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, and are there any misrepresentations of the views of the G20 leaders attending the summit?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to 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.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

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

Those opposite seem to think it is an unremarkable thing to refer to a statement directly from the British Prime Minister when he said no such thing. Can I say this to the honourable members opposite as they seek to shout and hope that this matter simply disappears: what did the British Prime Minister have to say in this speech about stimulus, Member for North Sydney? The British Prime Minister said the following about stimulus:

Just this morning I met with the head of the ILO to discuss the best way of protecting jobs.  In two days time I will be working for British jobs at the EU summit, stressing the need to implement fiscal stimulus packages in full without stopping them prematurely.

There is one reference to the word ‘stimulus’, I am advised, in this entire speech by the British Prime Minister. What we have from the member for North Sydney is a deliberate misrepresentation of the statement by the British Prime Minister in order to underpin a political attack here. The member for North Sydney can verbal people and he can infer what they may say according to his own view; he cannot purport in this place to directly quote the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom as making a remark which says that they are winding back the British stimulus when the British Prime Minister made no such statement, none whatsoever.

We have had example after example of the member for North Sydney being absolutely sloppy with facts, most recently with his extraordinary conspiracy theory about the G20 as a global leftist conspiracy. We have the extraordinary statement he made to the Australian the other day that somehow there would be expenditure cuts of between $40 billion and $50 billion, depending on which version of events you happen to listen to. We have had his extraordinary statement also that jobs should somehow not be the top priority of any democratically elected government in this country. All these things are of one type: they go to misjudgment. This goes to integrity. It goes to the deliberate misrendering of a statement by the British Prime Minister to infer that the British Prime Minister had said that the UK government was winding back its stimulus strategy. It is not in the statement by the British Prime Minister at all. It has been deliberately added by the member for North Sydney in order to make a point. This goes to the heart of this member’s integrity. I would ask you now to make proper recourse to the devices of the House to stand at the dispatch box and make a personal explanation as to why this misrepresentation occurred.

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.