Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I would have thought that the member for North Sydney, given his background in the financial services industry, would understand the flow-through impact of global credit supply on Australian financial institutions and Australian firms, large and small, and the impact, in turn, on employment. That is why the government, including the Treasurer, me and others, are directly engaged with other heads of government in the G20 in order to advance proposals to deal with the challenge which all global banks are now confronted with, including the particular problem which those large banks in the United States and the United Kingdom currently confront in terms of the state of their balance sheets.

The member for North Sydney knows full well that until that problem is effectively dealt with, we have a huge problem on our hands in terms of the global economy. The member for North Sydney may find this terribly amusing, but I think all seriously minded members of this House would understand that in the midst of a global economic recession, which has come off the back of a global financial crisis that came off the back of the state of the world’s global banks, we must also go back to the cause of the problem. That is what the government is dealing with.

What we are also dealing with in the meantime is sorting out what measures can be deployed responsibly within Australia to cushion the impact of the global economic recession on Australia. That is why we have advanced our policy to stabilise domestic financial markets by providing guarantees for every Australian deposit holder. That is why we have also advanced our proposals to provide short-term stimulus through payments to pensioners, to veterans, to carers and to first home buyers. That is why the government is in the business of supporting longer term stimulus by embracing Australia’s single biggest school modernisation program, embracing the biggest single injection into social housing that this country has seen—that is, 20,000 units—and investing in energy efficiency measures with the objective of ensuring that owner-occupied dwellings in Australia—all of them—have ceiling insulation by the time that that program has concluded.

What do these measures do? They stimulate jobs at the local level, they provide benefits by way of infrastructure for the long term and, in the case of the energy efficiency measure, they also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We have a strategy and a plan to steer Australia through the crisis. The alternative is the opposition’s approach, which is not to advance a serious economic alternative but to seek to turn everything to their political advantage. That is the simple contrast here. I say to those opposite that their approach of sitting back and waiting—of doing nothing—and then simply carping and criticising whatever the government does on the positive agenda is, frankly, ultimately unsustainable if they want to advance any credentials whatsoever or to be taken seriously in the Australian body politic at present.

We are faced with a serious crisis. The government in its arsenal does not have a silver bullet. We have said repeatedly that our objective is to cushion the impact of this crisis on Australian families and jobs. That is a responsible course of action; it is a strategy that we believe can see Australia through this crisis, and it stands in stark contrast with the absence of any strategy whatsoever on the part of those opposite.

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