Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There is another matter I wanted to deal with. Could the minister be so good as to explain why the provision in this legislation for a levy to be put onto succeeding financial institutions if one crashes, to cover the public liability for the crash, awaits the crash? Seeing we are guaranteeing financial institutions here and now through this legislation, with taxpayers’ backup, why is a levy not being sought from those financial institutions so that it can help ameliorate the prospect of a collapse of one of them? I would have thought that, if you wait until one of them collapses, the argument is going to be very strong indeed from those who remain that a levy will do nothing but make their situation more precarious. It would seem logical to me that the quid pro quo for the public largesse in this extraordinarily valuable guarantee being given to financial institutions should be a fund to be raised now to save the public dollar in the event of a financial collapse.