Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

He walked away from it; I do not blame him. He walked away from the flawed Fuelwatch scheme. Fuelwatch was essentially a website to inform motorists about the cost of petrol. There are already websites that do that. You do not have to spend millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in order to set up a website to give them information they can already access. But the government refuses to admit that this was just a stunt, and it has backfired.

Then of course we had GroceryWatch. The government having promised pensioners and householders that they would bring down the price of groceries, we have seen grocery prices soar. What was the government’s answer? Another website—yet this time the website contains information that is a month old. You do not even get up-to-date information. Instead of going to the postbox and getting the leaflets from the supermarket that set out the specials and the prices, or going to your supermarket and getting the current daily prices, you log on to the government’s website and you find information that is a month old, has no reference to specials—and most Australians look for specials when they are going to their supermarkets—and avoids supporting the independent retailers in Australia. What it does is it backs Coles, backs Woolworths and ignores the small independent grocers in this country.

It is so flawed, so out of touch and so out of date that it is embarrassing for the government. Yet have we seen any leadership? A true leader would stand up and say: ‘Okay, I’ve made a mistake. That was a waste of taxpayers’ money. We’ll put an end to it now.’ There is nothing that is in the least bit salvageable about this GroceryWatch website, apart from the fact that the Assistant Treasurer obviously taps into it every day to make sure that it gets enough hits to keep the little monitor ticking over. That is a real concern with the government: they will not admit they are wrong. And they are so incompetent when it comes to the handling of the serious financial challenges that are facing this country.

I just want to touch on the subject of short selling—not in itself, because of course it is not an issue that affects people day to day, but because it is such an important response to the international financial crisis. It is illuminating to see how botched the government’s response has been to the question of putting a ban on short selling. Let me take you through a chronology because then you will appreciate how incompetent this government has been in its response to the international financial crisis—its inability to respond under pressure. On Wednesday last week, 17 September, the US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted some new rules requiring that short sellers and their broker-dealers deliver securities by the close of business on the settlement date—in other words, to stop short selling—and they imposed penalties for the failure to do so. The following day, Thursday, 18 September, in the United Kingdom, the Financial Services Authority agreed to introduce new provisions to the Code of Market Conduct to prohibit the active creation or increase of net short positions in publicly quoted financial companies. Then, on the morning of 19 September, reports began to emerge from the United States that the Securities and Exchange Commission intended to temporarily ban short selling. That was being reported in the media by Friday morning Australian time.

In contrast to the measured approach of the SEC in the United States and the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom, the Rudd government dithered. They were like rabbits caught in the spotlight. You see, not a few weeks ago the Minister for Superannuation and Corporate Law stressed that the Rudd government would not ban short selling. To give you an idea of how in touch the Prime Minister was on this important issue of banning short selling to stem the impacts of the international financial crisis, in a press conference on 19 September the Prime Minister referred to his Assistant Treasurer, Chris Bowen, who is sitting at the table, being in consultation with the finance industry on short selling. He identified the minister at the table, the Assistant Treasurer, as the person in the government who was working on a proposal with the financial industry about the future of short selling. He said that was the man. Then he said:

… as far as short selling is concerned I draw your attention to what Chris Bowen has been doing already and this was well ahead of the developments of the last week or so.

Mistake! That was not Chris Bowen at all. What happened to the Minister for Superannuation and Corporate Law, who was apparently handling this? Doesn’t that tell you about the Prime Minister’s grasp on what is going on in his government? In the face of one of the greatest financial crises that the United States has faced, that is having impacts across the world, the Prime Minister does not even know—he has no idea—which one of his ministers is actually handling this issue.

But it got worse. Not only did the Prime Minister have no idea; the government had three—now four—positions on the issue of short selling, day by day. They had one position on Friday, then, whoops, they had not gone far enough, so they had another position on Sunday—after the Leader of the Opposition had been on the Laurie Oakes program, coincidentally. Then they managed to come up with another position—’Whoops, that’s gone too far.’ What is going on within the government? It is a failure of leadership on the part of the government. (Time expired)

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