Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Some of us sneak in the back door. I will take that interjection. He said, ‘He hasn’t been doing too bad a job of it,’ in response to it, while the voting public has taken a different view, with the latest Nielsen poll showing 56 per cent of people supported Mr Rudd’s response to the crisis. So the Liberal member for Tangney, nice fellow that he is, said that he has not been doing too bad job of it. Yet on 10 November, on Monday night, the member for Tangney said:

The government had an opportunity to prove they could handle the economy. I think that the rushed, uninformed, go-it-alone attempt at their rescue package shows that Australia is in real trouble with these clowns at the wheel.

So some of them come out and speak in support of it. The Leader of the Opposition spoke in support of the package and yet some of his backbenchers in the Main Committee do not. That shows you where they are at with it. They are walking both sides of the street. What do they do then? They thrash around, trying to find some traction: ‘We want to get stuck into this lot over this, but we don’t want to criticise it too much because we know that struggling families, pensioners and carers are in need of this. We know that first home owners are crying out for assistance.’ They pride themselves on fighting for small business, so they have to be really careful how they go about this. They put their heads together in their party room—it would have been an interesting meeting—and they think about how they can come up with a way to discredit the government over this. So what they decide to do is attack Ken Henry.

All of us in public life have to be accountable and Mr Henry is no different. I do not have a problem with that. The problem I have is that the Leader of the Opposition stands in this place and speaks about Mr Henry in glowing terms—terms that he said would make even Mr Henry’s mother blush. He speaks like that but then he lets the attack dogs out the front discredit not only Mr Henry but also his position. They also discredit the Reserve Bank. They have a go at everyone. No-one is immune to it. They do it out the front door, and the Leader of the Opposition should be standing up and calling the attack dogs off. If he really does feel like that about Mr Henry, he should go out the front and do it himself. That is the way it should work. If he has a criticism about what is going on—and I am not saying that Mr Henry is above criticism; of course he is not—the Leader of the Opposition should not come in here and talk about Mr Henry as if he was one of his best mates and say that he has a lot of respect for him, then let some of his members, the attack dog squad, go out the front and discredit him at every opportunity. That is wrong.

If the Leader of the Opposition has got the courage, he should be the one out the front having a go at Mr Henry. They talk about business confidence and all they are doing is undermining it at every opportunity. They are attacking the Reserve Bank. They are attacking the people in the regulatory domain. They are attacking those types of people and they are also undermining the strategy that we have formulated to deal with this financial crisis.

Let us not forget who caused it. Let us not forget that Malcolm, the Leader of the Opposition, is very close to the merchant bankers of the world—some people call him the Merchant of Venice—because they are the ones that started this. And he brings that slippery type of stuff into this parliament—slippery, sly work where he goes in and says one thing in here and then he does something else outside. He says one thing in here and then he sends out the attack dogs, and they get out the front and try to discredit the people who are in here and people that are working towards trying to solve this problem.

If we had not acted decisively, economic growth would have been much weaker than currently forecast, with flow-on impacts for employment. The strategy is expected to result in a boost to the level of real GDP of between half and one per cent. At a time when we need it most, the strategy will immediately improve the lives of thousands of Australians who are finding it really tough at the moment—the pensioners in Darwin, small business operators in Palmerston, farmers and their families in Humpty Doo. When the Prime Minster announced the measures, he said they were ‘an economic security strategy to help underpin positive economic growth into the future and to provide practical support for households’. (Time expired)

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