Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

We will not be supporting the opposition’s original amendment or Senator Fielding’s amendments. While I genuinely believe that your amendment is made in very good faith, Senator Fielding, I take the point that Senator Murray made. On occasions I have considered requesting the Reserve Bank governor to appear before a range of Senate committees, and the indication that I have always had from his office is that he would be prepared to attend if an invitation were extended. So that is quite genuinely the case. It is not a prohibition that we cannot do that; it is just that we have not got round to doing it. I have contacted his office through the secretariat to see if he has been available, and he has always expressed a willingness to attend if the committee decided to go down that path.

I do have some difficulty coming to terms with the sudden blush of accountability discovered by the other side, though. After 11½ years they have suddenly discovered all of these new measures that they believe are important for the purposes of the independence of the Reserve Bank. They did not put them forward in government, they did not consider them in government and they were not supportive of ideas like this in government. They have run out of people on the donor list of the Liberal Party and the opportunity to reward their donors with seats on the Reserve Bank board, so now they have decided to go down a different path. It is entirely self-serving and hypocritical, and after 11½ years—