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

Cap in hand, the government, at the pleasure of the financial institutions, failed to ask the obvious question: what is the anticipated borrowing and therefore, for the public interest, what is the degree of liability, using this guarantee, that the public is to be exposed to? It has not asked that question. We now wait for the institutions to use this facility and to go and borrow—after they have filled out the application form upon which the guarantee relies—and then for the government to provide the public with an account, growing, no doubt, of the degree of exposure which it has as a result. I would have thought it very prudent indeed for the government to have got an estimate. The minister resorts to the terminology ‘precise figures’. Of course we know that those would not be possible, but an estimate is very, very possible indeed, and this committee ought to be having one.

The Financial Review—this is again today—says that the banks are eager to get in early and test the pricing power of this new arrangement. I ask the minister: what will the arrangement be worth to the banks in terms of the advantaged position they will be given, and how will that advantage manifest itself?