Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I think we have just witnessed one of the weakest and most pathetic political attacks ever mounted by an opposition in this parliament. I have spent some time in opposition in this parliament and I have seen some fairly weak attacks, but today just takes the cake. Surely, the Leader of the Opposition must now resign. He has been telling people for weeks that he has the smoking gun. He has been telling senior journalists and senior people in business that he has the smoking gun on the Rudd government. As it turns out, he has been in possession of a fake email. He must pledge today to make available for a police inquiry all of the resources used by the opposition, because it is clear that the grubby opportunism of the Leader of the Opposition knows no bounds.

The person sitting opposite, there, is supposed to be the alternative leader of this country. That is why he is called the Leader of the Opposition, the alternative Prime Minister. What is he doing in the middle of a global financial crisis where jobs are endangered, where there has been a crisis in car financing earlier this year and where there has been a need for urgent action from the Australian government? What does he do? He is just out there with the mud bucket throwing it everywhere and getting involved in all sorts of conspiracies. Many who have known the Leader of the Opposition also know he has been involved in these sorts of nefarious activities before. He has a history, and I believe that history will now haunt him as the events unfold when we look at the creation, obviously, of a fake email. So the clock is ticking for the Leader of the Opposition. If he cannot provide to this parliament some authentication for this email then surely he must resign, particularly in circumstances where his spokesman and he personally have been telling people about the existence of this email. But of course he is the Captain Smear of Australian politics and he has been throwing it around a lot in the last couple of weeks as we on this side of the House attempt to put in place the fundamental supports for the Australian economy to support jobs. It will be shown to be the case that most of the extreme statements they have been making about the Prime Minister and me are simply false.

I want to deal with some of the false statements that have been made by those opposite, particularly regarding what I have done responsibly as the Treasurer of this country. Nothing I have done and nothing that has been said by them or anybody else contradicts anything that I have said to the people of Australia in this parliament. I stand by those statements 100 per cent because at the end of the day Mr Grant received no benefit from OzCar and he received no assistance whatsoever from Ford Credit—no assistance at all—and that is the very basis of the allegation that has been made. We also were confronting a very serious situation where many car dealers were not able to access finance and we took the same steps to help other car dealers that we took in the case of Mr Grant—the same steps. Why did we do this? We did this because jobs were at stake in the community. We did this in an environment where many of the dealers, perhaps half of the dealers in the country, may have been in serious trouble. I will come back to that later on.

I do want to deal with this allegation that somehow there was some extra-special treatment given to one car dealer over another. I want to quote Mr Delaney, the Executive Director of the Motor Trades Association of Australia. He had this to say:

The treatment that Mr Grant, a member of mine, got was no different from the treatment all of my other members got on my intervention on their behalf to Mr Grech.

‘No different’: I will deal with that in a moment. He went on to say:

They were all treated in the same way and for the same good reason—there was no other way to do these things. In fact, I think Mr Grant has been treated less well because he went to the Treasurer.

That is what Mr Delaney had to say. And why is that the case? Because car dealers have been subject to a torrent of abuse from those opposite and dragged into a political situation that they simply do not deserve.

The shadow Treasurer sought to create the impression that no-one else was looked after, just Mr Grant—no-one else received any treatment at all. Let’s deal with Mrs Hull, the member for Riverina. There was an email to my office—

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