Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I will not. Thank you for your protection, Mr Acting Deputy President. The position is this. This is supposed to be non-controversial government business and that is the spirit in which I am taking it. I am quite happy for my questions to be taken on notice.

I think it is fair to say that there have been criticisms of the way the IMF has operated. There are issues of sovereignty. I note that Jeffrey Sachs, an eminent economist and the head of the Harvard Institute for International Development, was critical of a lack of transparency and of the IMF imposing policies with little or no consultation with the affected countries. For instance, Professor Sachs says:

In Korea the IMF insisted that all presidential candidates immediately "endorse" an agreement which they had nodrafting or negotiating, and no time to understand. The situation is out of hand …

I understand the importance of the IMF's role in stabilising the international monetary system but, as I said, I have some questions—on notice, in a sense. What will the level of rigour of scrutiny be if the IMF calls in this contingent loan? Will we know what the money will be spent on? What conditions can we as a nation impose on such a loan? If the parliament is minded to disallow it—it is a disallowable instrument, I understand—will the government be able to put all the relevant information before us? Those are my concerns and I think it is worth noting that a number of eminent economists around the world have criticised the IMF for the way it has gone about implementing some of its policies.