http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.auRSS feeds for Malcolm Turnbull MP60http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/90/Doorstop-Interview-Sydney.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=90http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=90&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/90/Doorstop-Interview-Sydney.aspxSubjects: Mumbai terrorist attacks; death of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan; computers in schools blowout; economic management. E&OE……………………………………………………………………… MALCOLM TURNBULL: Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, and their families, of this appalling terrorist attack in Mumbai.  We have had confirmation that two Australians have been killed. One of them, Doug Markell, was a constituent of mine and a former Deputy Mayor of Woollahra, and our prayers and condolences go to his family as indeed they go to the families of all those who have been killed or injured in this dreadful, murderous outbreak of terrorism. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai remind us of the importance of the war against terror and the very heavy price that is being paid by Australian soldiers in the front line in the war against terror. And so our thoughts and prayers too are with the family of the Australian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan.  Australians are putting their life on the line under our flag, wearing our uniform, taking the fight up to the terrorists that are threatening freedom and democracy around the world. And the events in Mumbai remind us that wherever terrorism occurs, Australia and Australians are challenged. Mumbai seems a long way away from Australia, but we know that there were many Australians in Mumbai at that time and a number of them have been killed and others injured. And our thoughts and prayers go to the victims and their families at this difficult time. Do you have any questions?  QUESTION: Obviously very personal view [inaudible] Mr Turnbull given the person [inaudible] MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well it is very sad. Doug Markell was seventy-one, his wife Alison and his children Charles and David are with him or on their way to him to Mumbai. He was the Deputy Mayor of Woollahra during 1994 and 1995, and so he played a leading role in our community in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and I’m very deeply saddened by his death.   QUESTION: Just on another matter, it’s emerged that the Government is going to have to spend nearly double what it originally thought on the computers in schools program. Just wondering what your response to that is. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well this week we had a debate in Parliament about the deficit, and we reminded the House that Labor deficits are never temporary. The last Labor deficit went for six long years, destroying jobs, undermining our prosperity, and it only came to an end after a Coalition Government was elected to make the hard decisions to set the economy right. Labor’s challenge is one of economic management, and what we have seen with the computers in schools saga is a program that was promised and costed at $1.2 billion now going to cost 2. It’s blown out by two thirds. So much for economic conservatism! And it was promised to put a computer on the desk of every student in [inaudible] in those middle years, those vital middle years of high school. And now we know it’s only going to put a computer on every second desk. So it’s going to cost nearly twice as much and deliver only half as much. That’s Labor economic mismanagement – just another example of the economic mismanagement that Mr Rudd is seeking a leave pass to undertake on a large scale as he proposes to take our government’s finances into deficit.       QUESTION: Do you think he should still spend the extra $800 million though? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well everyone is in favour of computers in schools, but Mr Rudd undercosted it dramatically as we’ve seen, and he over-promised. So it’s going to cost nearly twice as much and deliver half as much and that speaks volumes for his poor economic management. QUESTION: What do you think of the claim from some economists that have said it might be actually good for Australia to go into deficit for a short time as they try and spend their way [inaudible] this global credit crunch? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look we will not give Mr Rudd a leave pass for economic mismanagement and poor spending. We’ve just seen an example today of the type of economic mismanagement and poor spending that we were warning about all week. And I understand the report that discloses that this extra money is going to be needed was delivered to the Government on the 3rd September. So Mr Rudd has known about this blowout for quite a long time, but it’s only today that it’s become public. Thanks very much. [ends] adminSat, 29 Nov 2008 04:25:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:90http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/96/Mumbai.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=96http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=96&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/96/Mumbai.aspx Source: Parliament House Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} On behalf of the Coalition I join the Prime Minister in expressing our deep sense of shock and revulsion at today’s cowardly and murderous attacks in the very heart of Mumbai. This is an assault on all of us who cherish the value of free societies. We may not know how many lives have been lost to this senseless savagery but we do know the cost will be horrific and the pain will be immense for the families of the innocents who have died or suffered serious injury. For the people of Mumbai, sadly, this is far from the first encounter with violence and extremists, the cowardly, murderous terrorists. We well remember the horrendous bomb blasts in March 2003 which claimed 257 lives. We remember the serial bombings in the Western Railway three years ago, claiming the lives of more than 200 people simply going about their daily business. After a wave of terrorist attacks across India this year – Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and other cities - in which hundreds of people have been killed or wounded, these murders have now returned to Mumbai. It is a reminder to the world that the terrorist threat to freedom has not retreated and we must remain, as the Prime Minister said, as vigilant and courageous, as stalwart and forthright in our opposition to terrorism as ever. It is a reminder too to Australians that terrorism is a present threat around the world and we must be resolute in our own determination to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy. At this time we understand that two of our own citizens have been injured in these attacks and we pray for their safe recovery and we pray for the families of all people affected by this tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are also with those trying to contact friends or family in Mumbai, the hub for many Australians who are dealing with, working in, or trading with India, one of the world’s oldest and most revered civilisations. Today the people of India have our heartfelt support and solidarity. Australia and India have so much in common – a common heritage through the Commonwealth through the British connection, the English language, cricket, but above all, democracy. When we think of our achievements in Australia, of our parliamentary democracy, let us spare a thought of admiration for India, that vast country of over a billion people, which maintains a rich and vibrant democracy and which is now facing these murderous cowards who are trying to bully and threaten the people of India to try to disrupt their democracy. Democracy and economic freedom have lifted tens if not hundreds of millions of Indians from the very bottom of poverty. They have provided great opportunities in that free society and these terrorist seek to stop that. They are seeking to stop the progress of poor men and women out of poverty, and for that terrible crime they are condemned. We on the opposition benches stand together with the government in condemning these men and women that committed this crime and resolve to be as vigilant and stalwart as ever in our opposition to terrorism wherever it may be around the world.adminFri, 28 Nov 2008 04:35:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:96http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/15/Death-of-an-Australian-Soldier-in-Afghanistan.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=15http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=15&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/15/Death-of-an-Australian-Soldier-in-Afghanistan.aspxI was deeply saddened to learn of the death of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan today. The thoughts and prayers of all Australians are with the soldier’s family, his friends and his colleagues. He was there defending Australia's values, wearing our uniform, serving under our flag. This is a tragic reminder of the enormous danger our forces face in Afghanistan every day. It is understood that two other members of the Special Operations Task Group were also wounded in the attack. As a nation we are immensely proud of the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, their service and their sacrifice. As today's tragic events in Mumbai remind us, the threat from terrorism is very real and threatens Australians around the world. Our soldiers in Afghanistan are in the front line of the battle against terrorism. Today we mourn a brave man who has given his all in a war against terrorism that Australia and the free nations of the world must win. adminFri, 28 Nov 2008 02:24:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:15http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/97/Response-to-the-Prime-Ministers-Ministerial-Statement.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=97http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=97&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/97/Response-to-the-Prime-Ministers-Ministerial-Statement.aspx Source: Parliament House Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Mr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (2.25 pm)—Experience and history tell us that Labor deficits are never temporary. The last Labor deficit lasted for six years. It was not temporary. It went on for six long years, destroying jobs and it only came to an end with the election of a coalition government  determined to do the hard work to clean up the mess that Labor committed. The Prime Minister has today in his 22-minute address—which he was kind enough to give us a copy of 45 minutes before he started—sought a leave pass to abandon fiscal discipline. Only two days ago on 24 November the Prime Minister was asked whether he was prepared to push the budget into deficit and he said twice, ‘We do not see the need to borrow.’ On the same day his finance minister was asked the same question and he said, ‘We’re committed to keeping the budget in surplus.’ Forty-eight hours on and that has been completely abandoned. The key to managing difficult times is discipline and the willingness, the guts to take tough decisions. All through this year the Prime Minister has made no hard decisions. The Prime Minister has mismanaged our response to the global financial crisis. Right at the beginning of the year when the rest of the world was focused on the looming threat of the credit crisis coming out of the subprime crisis in the United States and fuelled by a collapse in housing prices, when the rest of the world was focused on that, our government in Australia declared a war on inflation, which it continued in its rhetoric right up until September and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The reality of the global financial crisis only dawned on the Prime Minister in mid-September. Until then he was still waging war on inflation. If honourable members on the government benches doubt me, let us look at what the Prime Minister said about the budget. Remember, the government is now claiming that the budget was designed to ward off the damage from the global financial crisis and they put it together with the global financial crisis in mind. There is no doubt that the opposition had the global financial crisis in mind. We said again and again that we should not be rushing into measures, be they monetary or fiscal that could overdo the downward pressure on economic activity that is coming in from the rest of the world. That is what we were saying consistently from the very beginning of the year. The Prime Minister on 13 May said: That is why as we embark upon this budget our first responsibility is to fight the fight against inflation…And on 2 May the Prime Minister said: …our job is to produce a responsible budget for the overall economy and that means fighting the fight against inflation. We are waging a war against inflation at present… Of course, from the beginning of the year when inflation was three per cent and had moved outside of the target band of the Reserve Bank, it was the Treasurer who said inflation was out of control. He said the inflation genie was out of the bottle. He egged on the Reserve Bank to put up rates, and rates went up twice at the beginning of this year. As honourable members are aware, monetary policy has very long lags. It is not a quick fix. When you put interest rates up or down, it takes a long time for that to take effect. The government was the only government in the developed world that was ignoring the global financial crisis, ignoring the global impact of that crisis and declaring its own war on inflation, when much darker storm clouds were on the economic horizon. The impact of those rate rises is being felt in the economy right now, just when we need it least. That is the consequence of the government’s failure to take account of the reality of the global financial crisis—a terrible error of judgement. Why did they make it? They made it because, throughout this whole year, the Prime Minister has not had an economic strategy; he has had a political strategy. His aim was to blacken the economic reputation of the Howard government. When he looked at the economic metrics, the numbers that he inherited—be it the money in the bank at the Treasury; be it the fact that all of Labor’s debt was paid off; be it the fact that the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins, had put aside money in the Future Fund to take care of the previously unfunded pension obligations to public servants and defence personnel—including record lows in unemployment and strong economic growth, he could only find one which was not ideal, and that was inflation, so he said, ‘This is what I will use to blacken the reputation of the Howard government.’ He went after that with a purely political strategy and, as a consequence, talked up inflation and interest rates and did so at precisely the wrong time. Is there anybody in this House or in this country who believes it was in the national interest for us to feel the consequences of monetary tightening today? Of course not. Everybody should be focused on the three most important priorities of the government, this House and every member of the parliament: jobs, jobs, jobs. That is the focus. That is what the government should be focused on, and yet they put pressure on the economy, downward pressure on economic growth at the beginning of this year, and they did it purely for political purposes. Always politics, always spin. If the government want to claim that they have had a coherent economic strategy, let me ask this: how could they claim to be coherent if waging war on inflation was the No. 1 priority—if the overwhelming and overriding mission was the war on inflation because it was out of control at a little over three per cent? Now that it is five per cent, that war seems to have been abandoned.Obviously the campaign was not going very well, so new wars have been declared across the board. We now come to the question of how we should address the global financial crisis. In the here and now, from the time Lehman Brothers collapsed and the crisis reached a new level of intensity in September, we have made the offer to work with the government on a bipartisan basis. We have invited the government to sit down with us; we have invited them to collaborate. We have not had the courtesy of any response to that other than contempt. Government members are mocking and sneering but they should be reserving their mockery for their own frontbench. Let’s not forget it was the opposition who said—privately, in briefings, directly to ministers and then publicly—that the wholesale term funding guarantee would not be effective unless there was an appropriation law passed by this parliament. That was so blindingly obvious to everybody familiar with financial markets but apparently not to the Treasurer. He had to be begged by the banks to provide that simple piece of legislation—in effect a boilerplate—to ensure that the government guarantee could be described by credit rating agencies and others as irrevocable, unconditional and timely in terms of payment, and he was pressured by the opposition. Then, when he stood up in parliament last night, he had the audacity to blame the opposition for drawing this defect in his own plans to his attention. What a joke! That is like somebody complaining that a helpful passer- by has drawn attention to a hole in his boat before he puts it in the water. The reality is: if the Treasurer had not finally woken up to the consequences of his own mismanagement and if we had not proceeded to pass this appropriation bill, the wholesale term funding guarantees upon which our banks, big and small, are relying to get the money they need to lend to Australians, to keep people in jobs and to keep the wheels of industry turning, would not have been able to be used and they would not have been effective. The government admit this now, because they have proceeded to bring the appropriation bill into the parliament, and yet they complain that we are lacking in bipartisanship. We have consistently made constructive proposals throughout this year. We were right about inflation at the beginning of the year—so much is very plain. We were right about the need to appropriate. We recommended that the retail deposit guarantee be set at $100,000. That was not a particularly original number. That is where it is in most countries around the world, and there is a reason for that. When you guarantee deposits, you obviously have a distorting effect on the market regardless of where the guaranteed level is set, because you plainly benefit those institutions and funds which have the guarantee versus those that do not, and that is why historically governments that have provided deposit insurance or deposit  guarantees have set them at levels that are high enough to provide comfort to households and small businesses in terms of their deposits but not so large as to distort financial markets. That is essentially the global norm. What did the Prime Minister do? When this matter came up for decision he did not sit down with the Reserve Bank governor. He did not sit down with the one regulatory agency that not only has the greatest expertise in this area but is actively involved in the financial markets. He did not sit down with the Reserve Bank. He did not call the Reserve Bank governor. No, he went for the big, grand gesture. He went for an unlimited deposit guarantee—in other words, the maximum possible distortion. You could not distort markets more than by having an unlimited guarantee. And what have we seen? We have seen adverse consequences around the country. Let us just walk through some of the things the Prime Minister has done by taking that step. Two hundred and seventy thousand Australians have had their savings, mortgage funds, cash management trusts and similar investment institution funds frozen to redemptions. That is because of the distortion that has been created by the government. Finance companies who provide the money to fund motor vehicle and equipment dealers’ floor plans—in other words, to finance the sale of cars and equipment—have not been able to raise money in order to continue funding their operations. Why is that? The cash management trusts that were the largest investors in the short-term debt obligations of these finance companies and in what is called commercial paper are investing overwhelmingly, if not entirely, in guaranteed bank deposits. The largest cash management trust, which is run by Macquarie Bank, has announced that it is only investing in guaranteed deposits with banks and other guaranteed institutions. So what this step did was dry up sources of finance for important parts of our economy, important parts of our financial system. We are seeing real hardship every day—jobs at risk, jobs being lost. Jobs, jobs, jobs— those are the three top priorities. The Prime Minister’s response has been costing us jobs already. When the problem with this deposit guarantee became apparent—and that was within a few days; I think the Treasurer has made that clear—what did the government do? Nothing. They did not lift a finger. They were terrified to admit they had made a mistake. Too gutless to admit that they got it wrong, the government did not make a move until a letter from the Reserve Bank to the Secretary of the Treasury found its way into the media, and there we learnt that the Reserve Bank governor himself, within a few days of this unlimited deposit guarantee having been announced, was so concerned about the adverse impacts it was having, of the kind that I have just described, that he urged the government to set a cap, and he said, ‘the lower the better’. We have seen bank chief executives, leaders in the financial community, saying, ‘The government must lower the retail deposit guarantee, with a cap of around $100,000.’ We know the government will not do that, because that would result in the Prime Minister having to concede that he was wrong and that maybe the opposition has a point. We know what the government really think about bipartisanship and collaboration. They have no interest in that. Despite our frequent efforts to sit down and work constructively with the government, which are always rebuffed, with scorn, we are told in this House by the Deputy Prime Minister that the opposition should, and I quote her, ‘Just get out of the way’. What a commentary on parliament, what a commentary on the way government feels about parliament: ‘Just get out of the way’. The Treasurer’s comment was that the opposition is completely irrelevant. Apparently we have nothing to add to his enormous sum of economic wisdom, the amplitude of which he demonstrates every time he rises to answer a question! We have continued and will continue to offer constructive proposals for the management of the response to the global financial crisis. Earlier this week, I raised the very important issue of insolvency laws. The Prime Minister read part of a letter from a business owner in Queensland who is fearing the prospect of bankruptcy. There are many  Australians who are concerned about these difficult times, and we receive the same letters and emails and calls and we are aware of that concern in our own communities. Over the years, one of the major criticisms of Australia’s corporate or business insolvency laws has been the fact that secured creditors have so much say—secured creditors almost invariably being the major banks—that they drive companies and businesses into a speedy fire sale liquidation receivership, destroying jobs, jobs, jobs, the three top priorities, and at the same time destroying businesses and indeed paying scant regard to the claims of other creditors, not least of which are trade creditors and so forth. So that has been a matter of concern for many years. I have seen that happen in my own experience over the years with many receiverships, which have resulted in the destruction of considerable value. One of the great strengths of the economy of the United States, which I think we all admire, is its extraordinary resilience. The Americans have a capacity to take terrible blows and then bounce back and dust themselves off, and the great engine of the US economy gets going again. We look forward to that happening in the wake of this particular crisis. One of the reasons for that is that their insolvency laws are very much focused on restructuring, reorganisation and rehabilitation of the businesses that have found themselves in difficulties, in bankruptcy in fact. There is an opportunity right here, right now, to look again at our insolvency laws to see what we can learn from the US experience. There has been plenty of work done on it and there are plenty of people in the insolvency industry who are very familiar with both jurisdictions. We could pull together some changes which I believe would preserve jobs. Those jobs need to be protected; we need to do everything we can to protect jobs. We call on the Prime Minister—if he has an ounce of bipartisanship in him and an ounce of genuineness in his commitment to bipartisanship—to sit down with us and look at how we can take reforms of that kind forward quickly. That will have a very material impact on how we respond to this crisis and how we ensure that, above all, we protect the jobs of Australians. This is the greatest priority of this parliament and it should be the greatest priority of this government to preserve the jobs of Australians. We recognise there are challenges there. The government has made mistakes in its handling of the global financial crisis to date. From the very beginning of the year it has made a number of wrong calls, and we cannot afford to have any more wrong calls. We cannot afford to have any more decisions which are supposedly swift and decisive but which turn out to be rushed and bungled. The Prime Minister gave us a tour of the global economic horizon, and there are many things he said which I think commentators and writers will find rather surprising. But the one objective of the speech he gave was the deficit he is planning to deliver. He wants a leave pass for economic laziness; he wants to be able to drop any pretence of fiscal discipline. He wants to be able to spend and he wants to be able to take whatever action he can—as long as it is not hard and as long as it is not tough. He is not interested in taking hard decisions. He is determined only to take the easy decisions and in doing so—with that lack of courage and discipline and with that political strategy—we are going to see not a temporary deficit but one that goes on for as long as we have the Rudd government leading this country. (Time expired)adminThu, 27 Nov 2008 04:36:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:97http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/16/Fair-Work-Bill-2008.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=16http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=16&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/16/Fair-Work-Bill-2008.aspxThe Coalition accepts that the Rudd Government has a mandate for workplace relations change as proposed in their election policy last year. The Coalition accepts WorkChoices is dead.  The Australian people have spoken. The Government’s changes to workplace relations come at a very difficult time for the Australian economy.  We take the Government on trust that these changes have been carefully considered and will not cost jobs. The Coalition acknowledges that industry stakeholders support key elements of the Bill. The Coalition believes that within the Government’s new workplace relations framework, union accountability must be maintained and unlawful behaviour penalised. The matter of individual statutory agreements was dealt with earlier this year in the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Act 2008. The Coalition has been advised by industry that the Government’s changes in the Fair Work Bill to provide individual flexibility in Awards and Agreements are sufficient. On this basis, we will not oppose these changes. The Coalition will not oppose the Government’s Fair Work Bill 2008 in the House of Representatives but we reserve our right to propose amendments to improve the operation of the Bill following the Senate Committee process without seeking to frustrate the Government’s election commitment to implement its ‘Forward with Fairness’ election policy.adminWed, 26 Nov 2008 02:27:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:16http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/99/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-WA-Division.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=99http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=99&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/99/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-WA-Division.aspx Source: Perth Convention Centre Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} E&OE…………………… Thank you very much Barry. Fellow Liberals, Colin Barnett, Premier, and my state parliamentary colleagues. Julie Bishop, my federal parliamentary colleagues. It’s wonderful to be with you. First let me pay tribute to a great West Australian Liberal, Chris Ellison, who is retiring from the Senate. Chris and I served in the last year of the Howard cabinet. He was the Minister for Human Services. He has had over 10 years as a minister in government and of course he’s served in the Senate since 1993. He will be an enormous loss to the Senate and to the federal parliamentary Liberal Party but the Parliament’s loss will be his wife Caroline and their children’s gain, no doubt. So we wish them all well. And congratulations to you too Chris for your preselection. Now you are part of a great West Australian tradition. You probably think you’re part of the Chris Ellison senatorial tradition – and you are that too – but you also have a House of Representatives tradition to follow and that is that of Dr Mal Washer. Dr Mal Washer is the physician at large to almost the entire parliament. And when there’s a bit of flu around there is almost a queue outside his office, sometimes there is a queue as Members – and he treats the Labor side occasionally too and you know sticks strictly to Hippocratic oath at all times – do no harm. But he medicines to the Parliament. Now you of course are in a different line of medical work – veterinary work. And I think you can reasonably expect that there’ll be plenty of small animals there, dogs and cats and budgies, and I’ve had a few calls about that. But Chris I just have to worn you about a call that you should be a little bit apprehensive about, from your future senatorial colleagues, the Honourable Bill Heffernan, Senator for New South Wales. Bill rang me shortly after he heard of your preselection and in the course of the discussion mentioned that his horse had a very bad limp. I don’t know how that’s going to get into the Senate corridors, how his horse is going to get in there, but what I think was more troubling was when he added – just as we were ending the call – that he was particularly pleased that you had been selected, because in addition to the horse his pet goanna had a very nasty cough. Now I’ve spent the last week, as Colin said, here in Western Australia. I’ve spent a lot of my life off and on coming to Western Australia and I’m very familiar with the description ‘wise men from the east’, which of course has always said very much tongue in cheek. And I think it’s really important for politicians based on the east coast of Australia to make sure that their visits to the west are not just, you know, quick trips, one day trips to Perth and in and out again. And so I’ve spent the week here and I’ve been with Barry Haase up in the Pilbara and the Kimberley and with Alan Eggleston up in Kununurra. We’ve been to Halls Creek, to Fitzroy Crossing, to Cloud Break, to Port Headland, to Kununurra. Then I came down to Geraldton and spent a day there, much of it with Wilson Tuckey. And then of course here in Perth I had a great day with Steve Irons, outstanding Member for Swan and of course our very good friend and shadow cabinet colleague Michael Keenan in Sterling. So it’s been a good solid visit. Western Australia really has had a dead hand of failed left wing ideology lifted off it by the election of Colin Barnett as Premier. This state has succeeded in the last few years despite its government, not because of it. Now we as Liberals believe that government’s role is to enable us, each and every one of us, to do our best. We want to create an environment which does not direct you what to do, that does not tell you what to do, but says: we are going to create the playing field where you can play your hardest and your best and if you do not succeed the first time well you’ll be able to dust yourself off, get up again and have another go. And that is the spirit of Western Australia and always has been. And I have to say I’ve participated in it. A company I started, a technology company, FTR, which is still operating here, has won export awards going back many years in Western Australia. I know at first hand the spirit of innovation and enterprise that is in Western Australia. And boy what a tonic it is to be here. You know people are getting pretty gloomy over on the east coast of Australia, and that is because they are paying too much attention to the Prime Minister. When I was down at the Bronte RSL, which is about as far east as you can go without getting to New Zealand, the question that I was asked repeatedly was: what does the Prime Minister mean when he says next year is going to be ugly? Well I have no more idea of what he meant then he did. But he thought it sounded good. He thought it would be good for a headline, good for a grab. I don’t know what he meant when he said responding to the global financial crisis was equivalent to a rolling national security crisis, you know with visions of threats and military issues and security issues. What does he mean when he talks about these things? He means nothing at all other than he wants to get a headline. And that is the big weakness of the first year of the Rudd Government. If you want to find a theme it is the same theme that we’ve seen with Labor governments around Australia – that they have been driven by spin; they’ve always had a political agenda but they haven’t had an economic agenda and they’ve always been prepared, determined to put the headline, the news grab ahead of substance. And so you saw in this state extraordinary positions taken. I mean imagine. When you think about it, Colin has quite rightly lifted the ban on uranium mining and GM cotton. Now I spent a day up with the irrigators at Kununurra on the Ord River scheme – again, so exciting, so enterprising, full of innovation, people filled with confidence and energy, and in large measure confidence because they know at last they’ve got a Liberal Government that will stand up for them, that will support them in their dreams, in their ambitions, in their wanting to have a go. But a key part of that future is to have crops that are capable of growing and thriving in those very challenging tropical environments – and GM cotton is plainly one of them. It has done wonders everywhere else in Australia. But here, purely to pander to left wing ideology, pander to elements of the media, you had a government that said: no we’ll stand against that, stand against an innovation, a scientific innovation that has so much benefits to bring – and of course benefits for the environment as well, because it saves so much pesticide. That’s the type of government that you’ve been labouring under here and it is a tribute to the energy of this state that has done so well despite that government, and of course now as we move into more challenging economic times the need for a government that is enabling and supporting and promoting enterprise is greater than ever. One of the great lessons I think that you can see in this state is the sort of limitless possibilities when people are able to get in and have a go. I spent a day with Twiggy Forrest – and I know that the Fortescue shareholders here are feeling a bit out of sorts at the moment, but leaving aside share prices issues, and there are no share prices that are looking flash at the moment – when you contemplate the scale of that investment, the scale of that enterprise, that 300km of railway, the enormous port, the enormous mine and you think of how quickly that has been put together. It shows you what enterprise and energy, what free enterprise in the truest sense of the word is capable of doing. And also at the same time that we were looking at those great things we spent some time with the communities in Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing. Communities where we have to recognise that policies, many of them, perhaps most of them well-intentioned in years gone by, have proved to be quite counterproductive. Communities where we were told 40 per cent of the children that are born have got foetal alcohol syndrome – an extraordinary percentage. I have to say I’ve heard many speeches in my life and many of them have been very compelling and persuasive. I’ve heard no speech or address more compelling then the remarks in Halls Creek from the matron of the hospital and a number of other leaders in the Indigenous community there arguing that there should be a complete ban on alcohol in that community. It was so powerful and so much from the heart and I know that Colin has already taken a stand against grog in communities in the north and that this is an issue that has to be addressed – and we have to recognise in these communities that so many of the policies we’ve had in the past have not been successful. And I felt as somebody who comes from the east coast of Australia, but who nonetheless has travelled a fair bit around Australia, I thought to myself as I sat there: I wonder how people in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra would think about these issues if they were able to come to Halls Creek and actually listen to the local people at the grassroots level. It is a different world and there is no substitute for being there. Now at the federal level we have, as I said, a Government that is focussed on spin. Let me just walk through Kevin Rudd’s year – and I won’t go into all of the committees he’s set up. That was very aptly described by our colleague Tony Abbott as Kevin Rudd hitting the ground reviewing. I mean even to the point where as Julie loves to deliciously remind audiences he, Kevin Rudd, said, and this sounds like a line out of the script of the Hollowmen where he actually said that he was going to set up a review into another review. Yes, as Mark Twain said, ‘only fiction has to be credible.’ And some of Kevin Rudd’s activities would go beyond the credibility of any script writer. But if you consider the global financial crisis that we’re facing, which is we all know began with a housing bubble, imprudent lending in the United States, you know, the collapse of the sub-prime market and we understand how that fed into other banks and institutions around the world, undermined confidence, promoted in effect a credit squeeze and all of those implications have come to affect the whole planet, every country including Australia. But right at the beginning of the year, we go right back to January, we had Kevin Rudd having inherited an extraordinarily strong hand of economic cards. You just think about it. Kevin Rudd had inherited a government, a federal government with no debt, not debt at all, in fact a substantial positive balance at the bank – so the federal government is a net lender. All Labor’s debt was paid off. Future obligations, which had hitherto been unfunded to Commonwealth public servants and defence personnel for their pensions had been paid off or provided for I should say in the Future Fund, and there was strong surpluses. Unemployment was at record lows, growth was high. By any measure the Australian economy was, as The Economist magazine described it, ‘the wonder down under.’ But Kevin Rudd has a political objective. He’s a very political man. And his political objective was to find an economic crime that he could pin on John Howard. Well he didn’t have a lot of material to work with but he didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good political yarn. And so they fixed on inflation, which in the December quarter of 2007 went above the two to three per cent target band that the Reserve Bank aims to keep it in, on average, over the cycle. And that’s an important point because the aim of the Reserve Bank is not to keep inflation between two and three per cent every quarter, but to ensure that it is there on average over the cycle. So yes, it was an issue but it’s an issue that had been dealt with on many occasions in the past. Rudd and Swan went to town. They said, and Swan said in particular, inflation is out of control. He said precisely, ‘the inflation genie is out of the bottle’. And he said it again and again, meaning it’s out of control. Kevin Rudd went further and said, ‘the inflation monster is wreaking havoc across the nation’. And of course this was all due to John Howard, this didn’t have anything to do with the rise in oil prices around the world or the big global rise in commodities. They fixed it all on John Howard. They talked up inflation and as a consequence talked up interest rates. They were the only Government in the developed world, of which I’m aware, which was talking up inflation at that time. Every other government, and I might say Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition in the form of Ms Bishop and myself, were saying: hang on, we’ve got a very severe credit squeeze occurring in the United States, it’s going to have global implications, the Reserve Bank should stay its hand and not put up rates and watch how this global credit crisis develops. We counselled prudence and caution when the Government was talking up inflation. Now with the benefit of hindsight I think it’s fair to say that our judgement was better. But what was their motive? Why were they the only country in the world, only leaders in the world to be doing this? Because they had a political agenda. And then of course on the 16th of September Lehman Brothers, the big American investment bank collapsed and that, I think it’s fair to say, took the financial crisis into a new stage of intensity and things became much worse and a whole series of failures followed – bank failures and so forth, Fannie and Freddie and AIG and a number of other banks and institutions around the world. Now the Government’s reaction there was very interesting. We said – and this is around the time I became Leader of the Opposition – we said, Julie and I said, we want to sit down with you and work cooperatively, we want to sit around a table and see how we can agree on measures or responses in a bipartisan way – and I think we had the overwhelming support of the Australia people for that. Everyone recognised we had a crisis. How are we going to deal with it? Working together. Kevin Rudd rejected that out of hand. So what were we to do as an Opposition? We felt the only responsible thing we could do is to provide support to the Government, where we thought, you know, that was appropriate or in the public interest, but in addition to that make constructive suggestions where we could. Now there was concern about banks and bank deposits and building societies and credit unions around the world, and governments around the world had been imposing or increasing bank deposit guarantees – we hadn’t had one in Australia but we’d agreed earlier in the year that it should be set at $20,000. I had privately said to the Treasurer earlier in the year that I thought that level was too low, should be somewhat higher – anyway I gave him the benefit of that opinion, privately, and he took no notice of it. We publicly proposed – Julie and I did on the 10th of October – that the bank deposit guarantee be set at $100,000. Why $100,000? Well it wasn’t particularly original. That is around the level it is everywhere else in the world. It’s 50,000 pounds in the UK, it’s 50,000 euros in Europe, it’s been $100,000 in the US for many, many years and was recently increased to $250,000. But that’s the sweet spot or the sweet range where the deposit guarantee is high enough to cover most retail deposits, household and small business deposits, but not so high as to distort money markets – because obviously the higher it is the more of a distortion because you discriminate against institutions and funds that are not guaranteed. Kevin Rudd that weekend decided to go for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. He said he had decided to do that in the closest consultation with the Reserve Bank of Australia. And yet we learnt to our astonishment I might say in Question Time – it’s one of the few occasions where he’s actually provided an answer that’s coherent – we learnt that he had not met with the Reserve Bank or discussed the matter with the Reserve Bank directly at all. It was the equivalent of going to war without talking to your generals. That’s how reckless it was. And of course he mislead everybody because if I said I was making a decision in the closest possible consultation with Julie Bishop and I’d not spoken to her and I just said to Chris Ellison, does Julie like this idea? And he said oh yes, I think she does. I mean that wouldn’t be closest consultation would it? That’s what Rudd said. He said that. So he verballed the Reserve Bank in that respect and then of course it became apparent that there was a very significant difference of opinion between the Reserve Bank and the Treasury, correspondence came into the public domain and Rudd had to back track and reserve the guarantee level down to a million dollars. Now you’ve still got all of the banks or the major banks anyway saying it’s got to come back to that $100,000 level, which we originally recommended. So that was a decision which has had extraordinary consequences. There are 270,000 Australians whose accounts and mortgage trusts and cash management trusts are frozen in large measure because of the unlimited deposit guarantee, because of course you discriminate against any fund that is not guaranteed. Finance companies that are critical to financing industry, but in particular the motor trade, cannot rollover their commercial paper because the cash management trusts and the super funds that use to buy their commercial paper, which is just a short term loan, a short term money market instrument, feel that they’re obliged to invest only in guaranteed funds and guaranteed institutions. And so the motor industry is taking it on the chin. It’s affecting state governments too because they, even though they’ve got a state government rating, their borrowing programs are discriminated against because they don’t have the benefit of a Commonwealth government guarantee. And so it goes on. So Kevin Rudd, both with his war on inflation at the beginning of the year, his misconceived deposit guarantee, had made the global financial crisis worse. Again I am not aware, I am happy to be corrected, I’d be interested to know if there is a contender for this prize: but I am not aware of any other developed country where the Government’s policy response to the global financial crisis has actually made it worse within their own boundaries. I’m not aware of any other country of which you could say that. Kevin Rudd undoubtedly has done that. And now we have the extraordinary situation where for more than a month Julie and I have been saying to the Government: we support you giving guarantees to enable the banks to borrow in the wholesale markets during this period instability – it’s obviously not something you want to have going on for very long – but nonetheless we’re happy to support you there but you must legislate for it because it will be ineffective if you don’t legislate, because if you don’t legislate the Government can sign the guarantee but they can’t pay it. It’s like saying I’ll give you a cheque but by the way you can’t cash it because there’s no money in the bank. I mean it’s a waste of time. So we’ve begged them to legislate. They, for whatever reason, whether they didn’t understand the law or they just do the opposite of whatever we suggest, they have refused to legislate. And as recently as last Thursday, their last Thursday of Parliament, the Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner categorically said they would not be legislating. The fact is now the banks have made it very clear the guarantee will not be affective for them unless there is legislation. So hopefully this week the Government will backtrack and try to make up for lost time and get it right. And yet they accuse us of not being bipartisan, of not being collaborative. And yet there we are making constructive suggestions, repeatedly. Whether it was with respect to inflation at the beginning of the year or the deposit guarantees now. Constructive suggestions which the Government seems to treat with contempt. Now of course their quite overt about the attitude they have to the Opposition. Julia Gillard has said that we should, and I quote her, “just get out of the way”. That’s really respecting our Westminster tradition. Wayne Swan, that guy who obviously feels he doesn’t need any assistance or input on economic matters says we are, and I quote him, “completely irrelevant”. Now I can say to you that we will not take a backwards step in standing up for the principles of sound economic management that put Australia in the strong position it was when Kevin Rudd took office. Kevin Rudd was dealt the strongest set of economic cards anyone could ask for. No government, comparable government had a stronger position as that. In fact Glenn Stevens made this point only a few days ago. He talked about the Australian Government having the benefits of years of – and I’m using Glenn Stevens words – “fiscal disciple”. Well whose discipline was that? That was John Howard and Peter Costello’s discipline. It wasn’t Kevin Rudd’s and Wayne Swan’s discipline – these guys who have already committed half of this year’s surplus to be spent on December the 8th. Now we’ll continue to take that strong line. We’ll make constructive proposals. We’ll continue to constructively criticise the Government, not in an attempt to play politics, but an attempt to stand up for the values of sound economic management that distinguish our side of politics from theirs. Because concluding where I began, the Liberal Party stands for something very different to Labor. We stand for freedom; freedom in a fair society. We stand for enabling people to do their best, not telling them what is best. And those values, those Liberal values are in my judgement, not as speaking to you as a Western Australian, but as someone who has spent a fair bit of time here and had a lot to do with Western Australians, I believe that the Liberal values of enterprise, of freedom, of having a go, of getting on with it, of taking risks, taking risks and if it doesn’t work out, having another go, vision, those are the values of Liberalism and they are the values that have made Western Australia great. And so as I leave this afternoon to go back to the east coast, heading back towards my state which is lead by Nathan Rees, imagine that. I would say that Nathan Rees is exhibit A in the case against fixed four year terms – but as I go back to the east coast, I tell you I’ll go back filled with the exuberant confidence of Western Australia. Your energy and your optimism is a real inspiration. And whether it’s talking to business leaders with Steve Irons and Michael Keenan here in Perth or to irrigators with Barry Haase and Eggy up in Kununurra or being with Twiggy Forrest himself overseeing his vast domains, right across this state there is great confidence and part of that is because they know that at long last they’ve got a government that believes in them, that believes in enterprise and will support it and support Western Australia as it goes on to even greater achievements in the future. Thank you. [ends]adminTue, 25 Nov 2008 04:37:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:99http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/98/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=98http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=98&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/98/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspxSource: National Press Club of Australia, Canberra   Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} **check against delivery** E&OE……………… Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Thank you very much Ken, it’s good to be back and with so many of my colleagues; Deputy Leader Julie Bishop, Leader of the Nationals Warren Truss and many other parliamentary colleagues. Now 2008 has been the year the American sub-prime crisis of 2007 became the global financial crisis. A housing bubble in the United States collapsed. It was less the result of extreme capitalism than of inadequate and inappropriate regulation, social engineering. It was largely funded by government sponsored mortgage funds and indeed encouraged by US Government policy. And of course underlying all of it was the complacency that good times would never end. But we are in a global economic storm and while the intensity of the crisis has escalated dramatically since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid September, the sub-prime crisis and the consequent global credit squeeze has been with us all year. So in assessing the performance of the Rudd Government in its first year, the key question is this: did the Rudd Government respond adequately and effectively to the global financial crisis? Now this is not to overlook the importance of many other issues or those issues that Mr Rudd has handled well. For example, he was right to make an apology to the stolen generation and he was right to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but in the circumstances neither of these symbolic decisions was either courageous or difficult. He was right to make the recent payments to pensioners – after ignoring their plight all year. But it must be noted that the payments were made, not out of a sense of fairness or equity, but as part of a $10 billion fiscal stimulus. Indeed it is difficult to identify any hard decisions that he has taken in his first year. And that is why the Government’s efforts to get a leave pass to run the budget into deficit is of so much concern. Australians understand the importance of living within a budget, whether it’s at the household, the business or the national level.  As Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens observed last week, Australia is well positioned to cope with adversity because it has practised disciplined macroeconomic policies over many years. Governor Stevens also warned that the quality of spending decisions must be maintained even in these difficult times – a clear warning to Mr Rudd not to run the Government into deficit with politically appealing but economically reckless spending. Given the strong public finances Mr Rudd has inherited and the growth forecasts we are relying on for next year, Australians rightly regard the prospect of a deficit budget next year as a failure in economic management – an admission that Mr Rudd could not maintain a strong economy and above all could not live within his means.  Mr Rudd has disappointed on many other policy fronts. His empty grandstanding on FuelWatch and GroceryWatch, not to speak of the cynical hypocrisy over the alcopops tax hike, seems more appropriate to the script of “The Hollowmen” than the real world of government. He has also badly mishandled the implementation of the National Plan for Water Security – the federal leadership over interstate waters which we legislated for in 2007 is being replaced by a return to an ineffectual consensus approach to water planning – a proven failure if there ever was one.  His education revolution is as shambolic as the broadband revolution – neither shows any signs of delivering on the heady campaign rhetoric. But now more than ever the focus of the nation is on the economy. Governments are not just elected to implement policies – not that Mr Rudd had many policies – but they are elected to manage the difficult and the unpredictable. Nobody is assured of fair winds and a calm sea and the real test of leadership is dealing with the unexpected. Mr Rudd of course inherited an economy and public finances the envy of the world. Unemployment at an historic low, high economic growth, all Commonwealth debt paid off. The Treasury was a substantial net lender and the previously unfunded obligations to public service and defence pensions had been provided for in the Future Fund. However, it had become very clear from late 2007 that there were storm clouds on the economic horizon. The sub-prime crisis was already threatening economic growth and Governments and central banks around the world were looking to loosen monetary and fiscal policy to ward off an economic slow down. Mr Rudd’s first response to the sub-prime crisis was dead wrong. For the first eight months of this year, Mr Rudd and Mr Swan behaved as though it didn’t exist. Instead they chose to talk up inflation. Mr Swan famously said it was out of control – “the inflation genie is out of the bottle”. Mr Rudd went further and declared a war on inflation – the first of many campaigns he’s launched this year – and then spoke of an “inflation monster” wreaking havoc across the country. Inflation was outside the Reserve Bank’s target range, but that was not unprecedented and the target range of two to three per cent is to be achieved on average over the cycle. Inflation was elevated, it was higher than desirable but it was most certainly not out of control. It was also a global problem. Commodity prices, especially oil and food, had risen dramatically everywhere. But other governments were more concerned about economic growth at this time, more concerned about jobs. So why was Mr Rudd so focussed on inflation? Why was he out of step with other governments? The answer is a very simple one and it reveals a theme that has continued all year. Mr Rudd has never had an economic strategy, only a political strategy. Like the failed Labor politicians in New South Wales who delivered him the leadership, with Mr Rudd politics always trumps economics. Spin always trumps substance. Mr Rudd wanted to tarnish the economic reputation of the Howard Government.  The only economic metric that was not ideal was inflation, and so he chose to declare war on it. Now in truth Australia’s inflation was no more created by John Howard than the G20 was discovered by Kevin Rudd. But the price of this particular war is being paid now. Inflationary expectations were made worse. The Reserve Bank raised rates twice this year. Those rate rises are impacting on our economy now. So the consequence of Mr Rudd putting politics ahead of economics, of putting spin ahead of substance is that the impact of tighter monetary policy is being felt at precisely the time we need it least. And what was the Opposition doing? We urged the Government not to talk up inflation. We pointed to the growing credit crisis internationally and we urged the Reserve Bank not to raise rates because, we said, the impact of that credit crisis was likely to slow economic growth. For the benefit of hindsight it is clear we made the right call. But at the time we were dismissed by Mr Rudd as having abandoned all economic credibility or indeed of having imbibed too much red cordial. The Budget’s impact was fairly neutral – mildly contractionary or mildly inflationary depending on whom you spoke to. The only puzzle was why the Government delivered such a neutral budget after many weeks of threatening savage cuts to put downward pressure on inflation – this line always delivered by Mr Swan with a gesture presumably designed to indicate him pushing a recalcitrant genie back into its bottle. In the lead up to the Budget, the Opposition argued that the Government should not make savage cuts to expenditure. We pointed out that to have an impact on aggregate demand and hence on inflation the cut to expenditure would have to be in the order of half of one per cent of GDP or between $5 and $6 billion and that we argued was inappropriate given the international situation. That again according to Mr Swan was another example of my dwindling stock of economic credibility. Things got much more serious in mid September after Lehman Brothers collapsed.  Governments around the world moved quickly to secure their financial institutions against collapse. In the United States the Government obtained congressional support for a $700 billion bailout. In the UK the Government stepped up and acquired large equity holdings in the major banks to secure their capital base. Everywhere Governments put in place guarantees on retail deposits, almost all with caps in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. The wholesale borrowings of banks were also offered government guarantees. Now we quickly made an offer to work with the Prime Minister on a bi-partisan basis and wrote to him to seek a meeting to discuss appropriate responses to the worsening global financial crisis. This offer was rejected contemptuously. The most revealing advice on how we should proceed was delivered by his deputy, Ms Gillard, who said we should “just get out of the way”. Mr Swan’s assessment of course was that the Opposition is “completely irrelevant”. The Government’s definition of “bi-partisanship” plainly is unquestioning obedience. Mr Rudd quietly abandoned the war on inflation.  It hadn’t been going very well anyway. If inflation was out of control at three per cent, what could he say now it was five per cent? So absent only a cigar and bowler hat, the Prime Minister then struck a Churchillian pose. The global financial crisis was a “rolling national security crisis”. In short he declared another war. The Opposition sought to make some constructive suggestions. We recommended that the Government invest in the residential mortgage backed securities market, which had basically dried up. This was rubbished by Mr Swan and described as a monumental gaffe – well it was monumental government policy a few days later. On the question of bank deposits we recommended the Government guarantee deposits up to at least $100,000. This was not a particularly original figure – it was pretty much the norm around the world.  Mr Rudd’s response to this proposal was probably the greatest and most far reaching mistake of his year in office. Without directly consulting the Reserve Bank, without even telephoning Glenn Stevens, he decided to guarantee all deposits in Australian banks, building societies and credit unions without any limitation as to the amount. Far from being swift and decisive, it is clear now the decision was rushed and bungled. It was over the top – why would Australia with probably the strongest banking system in the world establish an unlimited deposit guarantee when countries with much weaker banking systems did not do so? It signalled to Australians – wrongly – that there was something wrong with our banking system. Once again politics, this time liberally mixed with a big dose of panic, trumped economics.  Mr Rudd said that this decision had been taken on the advice of, and in the closest consultation, with the Reserve Bank. We now know that was not true. It was not taken in close consultation with the Reserve Bank and while we have not seen the advice the Bank gave the Government, if any, we do know that within a few days the Reserve Bank was warning the Government of real distortions in the financial markets arising from this decision and was urging the Government to impose a cap on the guarantee and I quote; “the lower the better.” That advice was ignored for two weeks and one wonders whether any action would have been taken by the Government to wind back the deposit guarantee to a cap of $1 million if the advice from the Reserve Bank had not been published on the front page of The Australian. The unlimited bank deposit guarantee has been a financial blunder of epic proportions. As a direct consequence 270,000 Australians with investments in unguaranteed mortgage funds and cash management trusts have had their savings frozen. Finance companies which support the purchase of motor vehicles in particular have been unable to roll over their short term borrowings – the cash management trusts and the super funds that used to buy their commercial paper are now only investing in guaranteed deposits. Thousands of jobs are at risk in the motor vehicle industry. Even state governments have been up in arms – in practical terms a deposit with Australia’s smallest credit union has a higher credit rating than a bond issued by state government. The leading banks are begging the Government to rollback the guarantee to a cap in the order of that which we originally proposed.  The banks’ representatives are being told by officials that the Prime Minister will never agree to a cap at or approaching that recommended by the Opposition.  Once again politics trumps economics. Even now, more than six weeks later, I find it almost impossible to believe that Mr Rudd did not consult directly, and in person, with the Reserve Bank Governor and his senior officers over the deposit guarantee. It is as bizarre as deciding to declare war without speaking directly to the generals. But not content with bungling the retail deposit guarantee, the Rudd Government has bungled the wholesale term funding guarantee. Now that is designed to enable banks to access the wholesale funding markets, internationally, where traditionally they’ve sourced around half of all their wholesale funding. We supported the wholesale guarantee – after all other countries had done the same and Australian banks should not be disadvantaged. But we urged the Government to legislate for the wholesale guarantee. There were two reasons for that. The first is that while the Government can give a guarantee administratively, it cannot pay out on it without an appropriation law being passed by the Parliament. It is obvious that without that law being passed credit rating agencies, potential investors around the world, will not regard the Government’s guarantee as being unconditional, irrevocable and timely in terms of payment – that is what Standard & Poors have indicated will be required for a AAA rating – it’s self evident, it’s commonsense, it’s belt and braces, law and indeed economics. And the second reason of course is that the wholesale term funding guarantee involves the Government taking on potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of contingent liabilities. This should be the subject of a parliamentary debate. It should be the subject of legislation in the interests of transparency and accountability which sets a sunset date, which requires the fees to be charged to be on commercial terms and requires the extent of the guarantees given to be disclosed to Parliament.  Now the Government’s reaction to our proposal has been characteristically abusive and dismissive. As recently as last Thursday, the Finance Minister was adamant that no legislation would be introduced. He brushed aside the report from Standard & Poors. Since then the Australian banks have been unable to go out into the markets to raise money pursuant to the guarantees offered. The UK banks have been busy raising money. Their government has stated that it will legislate and legislation is before the parliament. Gordon Brown apparently has a better grip of both constitutional law and markets than Mr Rudd, Mr Swan and Mr Tanner. Once again Australian banks have been begging the Government to fix this blunder up too. Mr Rudd’s ineptitude is shutting off the cash flow banks need to lend to their customers. Again officials are telling them the Prime Minister has been reluctant to do anything that may appear to concede a win to the Opposition. Now the bungled guarantee saga demonstrate that far from playing politics with this issue, the Opposition has made constructive and, as it turns out, correct proposals on this important area of economic policy. We were right on the inflation issue at the beginning of the year. We were right on the retail deposit guarantee and we have been right on the wholesale term funding guarantee. Now if I appear too harsh in my criticism, let me observe that I recognise that these are very difficult times and mistakes will be made. A more prudent, less panicked, Prime Minister would not have gone for an unlimited deposit guarantee at the outset but set the level at the global benchmark, around $100,000, and then adjusted it up only if absolutely required. A more commercially astute Prime Minister would have recognised a government guarantee without an appropriation law being passed would not be effective, especially in these anxious times. But recognising Mr Rudd is in unfamiliar territory. Nonetheless when a policy is shown to be mistaken it should be swiftly corrected. And yet we see an extraordinary reluctance to change tack not for fear of demonstrating the Opposition has been right, but rather that the Prime Minister has been wrong. Running through all of these errors is the relentless desire of the Prime Minister to show that he is right and above all much cleverer than anyone else. How else can we explain the appalling incident concerning the G20 conversation? It would be bad enough if he had simply been indiscreet – as many people in this room know, there are many politicians who can be described as the soul of indiscretion. But Mr Rudd gave a version of that conversation to The Australian which he now concedes was false and was designed purely and simply to make him appear clever and the United States President stupid. Every line of the story given to The Australian was designed to aggrandise Mr Rudd – whether it was his superior knowledge of the G20, his special insights into China or the way in which he claims he stood up to Mr Bush. Perhaps that’s why Mr Rudd refuses to answer questions in Parliament, why he appears indignant that the completely irrelevant Opposition dares to challenge any of his policies.  Well, here is the news from the battlefront of Mr Rudd’s latest war. He has acquired a rare and unique international distinction. He is the only national leader whose policies in response to the global financial crisis have actually made the situation in his country worse and as a consequence put at risk the jobs and financial security of all Australians. If he had done no more than other comparable governments had done; if he had imposed a limited deposit guarantee; if he had legislated in a timely way for the wholesale guarantee; if earlier in the year he had not talked up inflation and interest rates, then he could have said that his policy responses had at least moderated the impact of the global financial crisis. But whether it was politics or panic, or more likely a bit of both, Kevin Rudd’s response to the global financial crisis has left us worse off than we otherwise would have been. Today marks not just the first year of the Rudd Government of course, but also the first year of the Coalition in Opposition. Now we will continue to make constructive proposals to deal with what Mr Rudd likes to call the “GFC” and in doing so hope to reduce the impact of what others are coming to call the “KFC”. The three top priorities of the Government in this coming year must be jobs, jobs, jobs. As part of our efforts to preserve high employment, I believe we need urgently to review our laws relating to corporate insolvency. Over the years I have been an advocate of Australia adopting rules which enable and promote corporate reorganisation and rehabilitation having regard to the more successful features, but not slavishly following, the US Chapter 11, which of course has elements that would not be appropriate in an Australian context. Now this approach, this approach towards rehabilitation and reorganisation, rather than liquidation, has been considered and rejected in years past largely because of pressure from the major banks who want to preserve their maximum leverage as secured lenders. Now this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of insolvency law, but I believe that one of the reasons the United States economy has always been so resilient, bouncing back from adversity much faster than other nations, is because its insolvency laws encourage companies to reorganise and restructure in bankruptcy rather than simply heading down the road of liquidation and fire-sale. Now this is not an esoteric issue only involving bankers, lawyers and accountants. In the course of my life I have seen many businesses, and many more jobs, destroyed by heavy handed receiverships and liquidations. All too often senior lenders take the approach of breaking up and selling businesses for whatever they can get, so long as it is enough to cover their debt, with no regard to the interests of unsecured creditors, shareholders and employees. I invite the Government to sit down with us quickly to discuss the changes that could be made to our insolvency laws to ensure that a higher priority is given to continuity and rehabilitation of businesses and above all to the preservation of jobs. Mr Rudd has said a lot about corporate salaries recently. Most of it has been completely ill informed. There are special problems with designing remuneration in financial institutions. In a nutshell the challenge is to ensure that people are not rewarded for writing new business, such as making loans without taking into account the consequences of those loans going bad.  Put another way, you have to ensure that there is indeed a sting in the tail. Now this is a complex area and one every bank is very focussed on, as they should be. Now, far from being an apologist for lavish corporate remuneration, in 1992 Lucy and I took the directors of Fairfax to court, successfully, to stop them issuing themselves options exercisable at $1.00 when the stock price was $1.50. In 2004 the Coalition legislated to allow for the disclosure of senior executives’ and of course directors’ remuneration and for a non-binding resolution by shareholders on those remuneration reports. But if you are going to ask the shareholders, why should their decision be non-binding? It’s like asking someone their opinion and saying, in the same breath, “I won’t take any notice of what you say unless you agree with me”. The fact is that many Australians are appalled by the level of executive salaries and even more astonished that shareholders’ opinions can be ignored. The law should be changed so that the shareholders resolution on the remuneration report, or at least that part relating to the chief executive, as well as directors, is binding. This would clearly place the remuneration of senior executives and directors directly in the hands of shareholders. It is their company, and nobody else’s. Let the executives justify their pay to the shareholders and if the shareholders don’t approve it, then so be it. In this vein of practical measures to respond to the financial crisis, last week the Shadow Minister for Small Business, Steven Ciobo, proposed an important reform to assist small business. At the moment there are heavy penalties if businesses paying their tax in advance in quarterly instalments underestimate their final tax due by more than 15 per cent. Mr Ciobo has called for that margin of error to be doubled to 30 per cent for the 2008-2009 financial year. This would provide significant financial assistance or cash flow assistance to small businesses and, given the economic circumstances, is fiscally prudent in our view. Somewhat overshadowed at present by the global financial crisis is the great challenge of climate change, our response to it and in particular the design of the emissions trading scheme. Now, I am not a climate change sceptic. I believe that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt and work to secure an effective global agreement to reduce our emissions to a safe level. Australia as a developed and wealthy nation should play a leading role. And in many respects, not least with deforestation and clean coal research, we are already playing a world leading role thanks to programs initiated by the previous Coalition Government. But we must not design an ETS that imposes heavy carbon costs on Australian trade exposed industries and which simply has the effect of reducing their competiveness and over time driving investment and jobs offshore to countries with no price on carbon. Exporting the emissions is as pointless as exporting the jobs is economically destructive. And that is why when we were in Government we proposed an ETS which would have required emissions intensive, trade exposed industries to maintain global best practice in terms of emissions, but would otherwise have exempted them from the scheme until such time as the countries with which they competed had a comparable carbon price. This common sense approach has been abandoned apparently by Mr Rudd and only on Friday he declared he was committed to imposing a heavy carbon price on Australia’s LNG industry, which of course produces the world’s cleanest fossil fuel. Remember every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted in Australia in making LNG saves eight tonnes of CO2 when it is burned in China instead of coal. Now our ETS must be carefully and responsibly designed. We do not believe the design can be responsibly completed prior to the end of next year by which time we will know what President Obama’s own ETS is likely to look like and above all what the nations of the world are likely to commit to at the Copenhagen Summit. That is why we believe the appropriate start date for an ETS is not before 2011. Our first year of Opposition has been a time for reflection and for renewal. We have heard the lessons of the 2007 election loud and clear. WorkChoices is dead. The people have spoken. We are working hard on new policies. A particular focus is tax. In our view we should aim for tax to be lower, fairer and simpler.  And we are working closely with Henry Ergas and others to achieve those objectives. In that context, as we discuss the possibility of further fiscal stimuluses, our view is that the most effective fiscal stimulus is a cut in taxation. It achieves the same objective of putting money into people’s pockets as grants do, but at the same time it provides real incentives for work, for investment, for employment. While policies will change over time, not least in response to the events of the day, our values are enduring. We stand for freedom in a fair society. We believe that government’s duty is to enable you to do your best.  That is the duty of government. Mr Rudd view of government is that it is there to tell you what is best. We recognise that the prosperity of this country has not been created by governments but by the energy and the enterprise of millions of Australians.  Very few of the men and women who will ensure Australia comes through this economic storm are to be found in government. They are in thousands of businesses, large and small. It is their commitment and above all their confidence that is vital to our continued prosperity. Last time I spoke to the Press Club I described Mr Rudd’s style as “Morris Iemma comes to Canberra”. Residents of New South Wales know what years of Labor spin, political stunts and economic mismanagement deliver.  Mr Rudd has had some good reviews lately – well so did Mr Carr and after eleven years what had he achieved other than an album full of glowing headlines? Australia deserves a government that is capable of making the right decisions in the national interest – based on sound, experienced economic judgement. That is the government we are committed to offer Australian people in 2010. Thank you. [ends]adminTue, 25 Nov 2008 04:36:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:98http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/17/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=17http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=17&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/17/Address-to-the-National-Press-Club.aspx Source: National Press Club of Australia, Canberra **check against delivery** E&OE…………………… Thank you very much Ken, it’s good to be back and with so many of my colleagues; Deputy Leader Julie Bishop, Leader of the Nationals Warren Truss and many other parliamentary colleagues. Now 2008 has been the year the American sub-prime crisis of 2007 became the global financial crisis. A housing bubble in the United States collapsed. It was less the result of extreme capitalism than of inadequate and inappropriate regulation, social engineering. It was largely funded by government sponsored mortgage funds and indeed encouraged by US Government policy. And of course underlying all of it was the complacency that good times would never end. But we are in a global economic storm and while the intensity of the crisis has escalated dramatically since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid September, the sub-prime crisis and the consequent global credit squeeze has been with us all year. So in assessing the performance of the Rudd Government in its first year, the key question is this: did the Rudd Government respond adequately and effectively to the global financial crisis? Now this is not to overlook the importance of many other issues or those issues that Mr Rudd has handled well. For example, he was right to make an apology to the stolen generation and he was right to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but in the circumstances neither of these symbolic decisions was either courageous or difficult. He was right to make the recent payments to pensioners – after ignoring their plight all year. But it must be noted that the payments were made, not out of a sense of fairness or equity, but as part of a $10 billion fiscal stimulus. Indeed it is difficult to identify any hard decisions that he has taken in his first year. And that is why the Government’s efforts to get a leave pass to run the budget into deficit is of so much concern. Australians understand the importance of living within a budget, whether it’s at the household, the business or the national level.  As Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens observed last week, Australia is well positioned to cope with adversity because it has practised disciplined macroeconomic policies over many years. Governor Stevens also warned that the quality of spending decisions must be maintained even in these difficult times – a clear warning to Mr Rudd not to run the Government into deficit with politically appealing but economically reckless spending. Given the strong public finances Mr Rudd has inherited and the growth forecasts we are relying on for next year, Australians rightly regard the prospect of a deficit budget next year as a failure in economic management – an admission that Mr Rudd could not maintain a strong economy and above all could not live within his means.  Mr Rudd has disappointed on many other policy fronts. His empty grandstanding on FuelWatch and GroceryWatch, not to speak of the cynical hypocrisy over the alcopops tax hike, seems more appropriate to the script of “The Hollowmen” than the real world of government. He has also badly mishandled the implementation of the National Plan for Water Security – the federal leadership over interstate waters which we legislated for in 2007 is being replaced by a return to an ineffectual consensus approach to water planning – a proven failure if there ever was one.  His education revolution is as shambolic as the broadband revolution – neither shows any signs of delivering on the heady campaign rhetoric. But now more than ever the focus of the nation is on the economy. Governments are not just elected to implement policies – not that Mr Rudd had many policies – but they are elected to manage the difficult and the unpredictable. Nobody is assured of fair winds and a calm sea and the real test of leadership is dealing with the unexpected. Mr Rudd of course inherited an economy and public finances the envy of the world. Unemployment at an historic low, high economic growth, all Commonwealth debt paid off. The Treasury was a substantial net lender and the previously unfunded obligations to public service and defence pensions had been provided for in the Future Fund. However, it had become very clear from late 2007 that there were storm clouds on the economic horizon. The sub-prime crisis was already threatening economic growth and Governments and central banks around the world were looking to loosen monetary and fiscal policy to ward off an economic slow down. Mr Rudd’s first response to the sub-prime crisis was dead wrong. For the first eight months of this year, Mr Rudd and Mr Swan behaved as though it didn’t exist. Instead they chose to talk up inflation. Mr Swan famously said it was out of control – “the inflation genie is out of the bottle”. Mr Rudd went further and declared a war on inflation – the first of many campaigns he’s launched this year – and then spoke of an “inflation monster” wreaking havoc across the country. Inflation was outside the Reserve Bank’s target range, but that was not unprecedented and the target range of two to three per cent is to be achieved on average over the cycle. Inflation was elevated, it was higher than desirable but it was most certainly not out of control. It was also a global problem. Commodity prices, especially oil and food, had risen dramatically everywhere. But other governments were more concerned about economic growth at this time, more concerned about jobs. So why was Mr Rudd so focussed on inflation? Why was he out of step with other governments? The answer is a very simple one and it reveals a theme that has continued all year. Mr Rudd has never had an economic strategy, only a political strategy. Like the failed Labor politicians in New South Wales who delivered him the leadership, with Mr Rudd politics always trumps economics. Spin always trumps substance. Mr Rudd wanted to tarnish the economic reputation of the Howard Government.  The only economic metric that was not ideal was inflation, and so he chose to declare war on it. Now in truth Australia’s inflation was no more created by John Howard than the G20 was discovered by Kevin Rudd. But the price of this particular war is being paid now. Inflationary expectations were made worse. The Reserve Bank raised rates twice this year. Those rate rises are impacting on our economy now. So the consequence of Mr Rudd putting politics ahead of economics, of putting spin ahead of substance is that the impact of tighter monetary policy is being felt at precisely the time we need it least. And what was the Opposition doing? We urged the Government not to talk up inflation. We pointed to the growing credit crisis internationally and we urged the Reserve Bank not to raise rates because, we said, the impact of that credit crisis was likely to slow economic growth. For the benefit of hindsight it is clear we made the right call. But at the time we were dismissed by Mr Rudd as having abandoned all economic credibility or indeed of having imbibed too much red cordial. The Budget’s impact was fairly neutral – mildly contractionary or mildly inflationary depending on whom you spoke to. The only puzzle was why the Government delivered such a neutral budget after many weeks of threatening savage cuts to put downward pressure on inflation – this line always delivered by Mr Swan with a gesture presumably designed to indicate him pushing a recalcitrant genie back into its bottle. In the lead up to the Budget, the Opposition argued that the Government should not make savage cuts to expenditure. We pointed out that to have an impact on aggregate demand and hence on inflation the cut to expenditure would have to be in the order of half of one per cent of GDP or between $5 and $6 billion and that we argued was inappropriate given the international situation. That again according to Mr Swan was another example of my dwindling stock of economic credibility. Things got much more serious in mid September after Lehman Brothers collapsed.  Governments around the world moved quickly to secure their financial institutions against collapse. In the United States the Government obtained congressional support for a $700 billion bailout. In the UK the Government stepped up and acquired large equity holdings in the major banks to secure their capital base. Everywhere Governments put in place guarantees on retail deposits, almost all with caps in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. The wholesale borrowings of banks were also offered government guarantees. Now we quickly made an offer to work with the Prime Minister on a bi-partisan basis and wrote to him to seek a meeting to discuss appropriate responses to the worsening global financial crisis. This offer was rejected contemptuously. The most revealing advice on how we should proceed was delivered by his deputy, Ms Gillard, who said we should “just get out of the way”. Mr Swan’s assessment of course was that the Opposition is “completely irrelevant”. The Government’s definition of “bi-partisanship” plainly is unquestioning obedience. Mr Rudd quietly abandoned the war on inflation.  It hadn’t been going very well anyway. If inflation was out of control at three per cent, what could he say now it was five per cent? So absent only a cigar and bowler hat, the Prime Minister then struck a Churchillian pose. The global financial crisis was a “rolling national security crisis”. In short he declared another war. The Opposition sought to make some constructive suggestions. We recommended that the Government invest in the residential mortgage backed securities market, which had basically dried up. This was rubbished by Mr Swan and described as a monumental gaffe – well it was monumental government policy a few days later. On the question of bank deposits we recommended the Government guarantee deposits up to at least $100,000. This was not a particularly original figure – it was pretty much the norm around the world.  Mr Rudd’s response to this proposal was probably the greatest and most far reaching mistake of his year in office. Without directly consulting the Reserve Bank, without even telephoning Glenn Stevens, he decided to guarantee all deposits in Australian banks, building societies and credit unions without any limitation as to the amount. Far from being swift and decisive, it is clear now the decision was rushed and bungled. It was over the top – why would Australia with probably the strongest banking system in the world establish an unlimited deposit guarantee when countries with much weaker banking systems did not do so? It signalled to Australians – wrongly – that there was something wrong with our banking system. Once again politics, this time liberally mixed with a big dose of panic, trumped economics.  Mr Rudd said that this decision had been taken on the advice of, and in the closest consultation, with the Reserve Bank. We now know that was not true. It was not taken in close consultation with the Reserve Bank and while we have not seen the advice the Bank gave the Government, if any, we do know that within a few days the Reserve Bank was warning the Government of real distortions in the financial markets arising from this decision and was urging the Government to impose a cap on the guarantee and I quote; “the lower the better.” That advice was ignored for two weeks and one wonders whether any action would have been taken by the Government to wind back the deposit guarantee to a cap of $1 million if the advice from the Reserve Bank had not been published on the front page of The Australian. The unlimited bank deposit guarantee has been a financial blunder of epic proportions. As a direct consequence 270,000 Australians with investments in unguaranteed mortgage funds and cash management trusts have had their savings frozen. Finance companies which support the purchase of motor vehicles in particular have been unable to roll over their short term borrowings – the cash management trusts and the super funds that used to buy their commercial paper are now only investing in guaranteed deposits. Thousands of jobs are at risk in the motor vehicle industry. Even state governments have been up in arms – in practical terms a deposit with Australia’s smallest credit union has a higher credit rating than a bond issued by state government. The leading banks are begging the Government to rollback the guarantee to a cap in the order of that which we originally proposed.  The banks’ representatives are being told by officials that the Prime Minister will never agree to a cap at or approaching that recommended by the Opposition.  Once again politics trumps economics. Even now, more than six weeks later, I find it almost impossible to believe that Mr Rudd did not consult directly, and in person, with the Reserve Bank Governor and his senior officers over the deposit guarantee. It is as bizarre as deciding to declare war without speaking directly to the generals. But not content with bungling the retail deposit guarantee, the Rudd Government has bungled the wholesale term funding guarantee. Now that is designed to enable banks to access the wholesale funding markets, internationally, where traditionally they’ve sourced around half of all their wholesale funding. We supported the wholesale guarantee – after all other countries had done the same and Australian banks should not be disadvantaged. But we urged the Government to legislate for the wholesale guarantee. There were two reasons for that. The first is that while the Government can give a guarantee administratively, it cannot pay out on it without an appropriation law being passed by the Parliament. It is obvious that without that law being passed credit rating agencies, potential investors around the world, will not regard the Government’s guarantee as being unconditional, irrevocable and timely in terms of payment – that is what Standard & Poors have indicated will be required for a AAA rating – it’s self evident, it’s commonsense, it’s belt and braces, law and indeed economics. And the second reason of course is that the wholesale term funding guarantee involves the Government taking on potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of contingent liabilities. This should be the subject of a parliamentary debate. It should be the subject of legislation in the interests of transparency and accountability which sets a sunset date, which requires the fees to be charged to be on commercial terms and requires the extent of the guarantees given to be disclosed to Parliament.  Now the Government’s reaction to our proposal has been characteristically abusive and dismissive. As recently as last Thursday, the Finance Minister was adamant that no legislation would be introduced. He brushed aside the report from Standard & Poors. Since then the Australian banks have been unable to go out into the markets to raise money pursuant to the guarantees offered. The UK banks have been busy raising money. Their government has stated that it will legislate and legislation is before the parliament. Gordon Brown apparently has a better grip of both constitutional law and markets than Mr Rudd, Mr Swan and Mr Tanner. Once again Australian banks have been begging the Government to fix this blunder up too. Mr Rudd’s ineptitude is shutting off the cash flow banks need to lend to their customers. Again officials are telling them the Prime Minister has been reluctant to do anything that may appear to concede a win to the Opposition. Now the bungled guarantee saga demonstrate that far from playing politics with this issue, the Opposition has made constructive and, as it turns out, correct proposals on this important area of economic policy. We were right on the inflation issue at the beginning of the year. We were right on the retail deposit guarantee and we have been right on the wholesale term funding guarantee. Now if I appear too harsh in my criticism, let me observe that I recognise that these are very difficult times and mistakes will be made. A more prudent, less panicked, Prime Minister would not have gone for an unlimited deposit guarantee at the outset but set the level at the global benchmark, around $100,000, and then adjusted it up only if absolutely required. A more commercially astute Prime Minister would have recognised a government guarantee without an appropriation law being passed would not be effective, especially in these anxious times. But recognising Mr Rudd is in unfamiliar territory. Nonetheless when a policy is shown to be mistaken it should be swiftly corrected. And yet we see an extraordinary reluctance to change tack not for fear of demonstrating the Opposition has been right, but rather that the Prime Minister has been wrong. Running through all of these errors is the relentless desire of the Prime Minister to show that he is right and above all much cleverer than anyone else. How else can we explain the appalling incident concerning the G20 conversation? It would be bad enough if he had simply been indiscreet – as many people in this room know, there are many politicians who can be described as the soul of indiscretion. But Mr Rudd gave a version of that conversation to The Australian which he now concedes was false and was designed purely and simply to make him appear clever and the United States President stupid. Every line of the story given to The Australian was designed to aggrandise Mr Rudd – whether it was his superior knowledge of the G20, his special insights into China or the way in which he claims he stood up to Mr Bush. Perhaps that’s why Mr Rudd refuses to answer questions in Parliament, why he appears indignant that the completely irrelevant Opposition dares to challenge any of his policies.  Well, here is the news from the battlefront of Mr Rudd’s latest war. He has acquired a rare and unique international distinction. He is the only national leader whose policies in response to the global financial crisis have actually made the situation in his country worse and as a consequence put at risk the jobs and financial security of all Australians. If he had done no more than other comparable governments had done; if he had imposed a limited deposit guarantee; if he had legislated in a timely way for the wholesale guarantee; if earlier in the year he had not talked up inflation and interest rates, then he could have said that his policy responses had at least moderated the impact of the global financial crisis. But whether it was politics or panic, or more likely a bit of both, Kevin Rudd’s response to the global financial crisis has left us worse off than we otherwise would have been. Today marks not just the first year of the Rudd Government of course, but also the first year of the Coalition in Opposition. Now we will continue to make constructive proposals to deal with what Mr Rudd likes to call the “GFC” and in doing so hope to reduce the impact of what others are coming to call the “KFC”. The three top priorities of the Government in this coming year must be jobs, jobs, jobs. As part of our efforts to preserve high employment, I believe we need urgently to review our laws relating to corporate insolvency. Over the years I have been an advocate of Australia adopting rules which enable and promote corporate reorganisation and rehabilitation having regard to the more successful features, but not slavishly following, the US Chapter 11, which of course has elements that would not be appropriate in an Australian context. Now this approach, this approach towards rehabilitation and reorganisation, rather than liquidation, has been considered and rejected in years past largely because of pressure from the major banks who want to preserve their maximum leverage as secured lenders. Now this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of insolvency law, but I believe that one of the reasons the United States economy has always been so resilient, bouncing back from adversity much faster than other nations, is because its insolvency laws encourage companies to reorganise and restructure in bankruptcy rather than simply heading down the road of liquidation and fire-sale. Now this is not an esoteric issue only involving bankers, lawyers and accountants. In the course of my life I have seen many businesses, and many more jobs, destroyed by heavy handed receiverships and liquidations. All too often senior lenders take the approach of breaking up and selling businesses for whatever they can get, so long as it is enough to cover their debt, with no regard to the interests of unsecured creditors, shareholders and employees. I invite the Government to sit down with us quickly to discuss the changes that could be made to our insolvency laws to ensure that a higher priority is given to continuity and rehabilitation of businesses and above all to the preservation of jobs. Mr Rudd has said a lot about corporate salaries recently. Most of it has been completely ill informed. There are special problems with designing remuneration in financial institutions. In a nutshell the challenge is to ensure that people are not rewarded for writing new business, such as making loans without taking into account the consequences of those loans going bad.  Put another way, you have to ensure that there is indeed a sting in the tail. Now this is a complex area and one every bank is very focussed on, as they should be. Now, far from being an apologist for lavish corporate remuneration, in 1992 Lucy and I took the directors of Fairfax to court, successfully, to stop them issuing themselves options exercisable at $1.00 when the stock price was $1.50. In 2004 the Coalition legislated to allow for the disclosure of senior executives’ and of course directors’ remuneration and for a non-binding resolution by shareholders on those remuneration reports. But if you are going to ask the shareholders, why should their decision be non-binding? It’s like asking someone their opinion and saying, in the same breath, “I won’t take any notice of what you say unless you agree with me”. The fact is that many Australians are appalled by the level of executive salaries and even more astonished that shareholders’ opinions can be ignored. The law should be changed so that the shareholders resolution on the remuneration report, or at least that part relating to the chief executive, as well as directors, is binding. This would clearly place the remuneration of senior executives and directors directly in the hands of shareholders. It is their company, and nobody else’s. Let the executives justify their pay to the shareholders and if the shareholders don’t approve it, then so be it. In this vein of practical measures to respond to the financial crisis, last week the Shadow Minister for Small Business, Steven Ciobo, proposed an important reform to assist small business. At the moment there are heavy penalties if businesses paying their tax in advance in quarterly instalments underestimate their final tax due by more than 15 per cent. Mr Ciobo has called for that margin of error to be doubled to 30 per cent for the 2008-2009 financial year. This would provide significant financial assistance or cash flow assistance to small businesses and, given the economic circumstances, is fiscally prudent in our view. Somewhat overshadowed at present by the global financial crisis is the great challenge of climate change, our response to it and in particular the design of the emissions trading scheme. Now, I am not a climate change sceptic. I believe that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt and work to secure an effective global agreement to reduce our emissions to a safe level. Australia as a developed and wealthy nation should play a leading role. And in many respects, not least with deforestation and clean coal research, we are already playing a world leading role thanks to programs initiated by the previous Coalition Government. But we must not design an ETS that imposes heavy carbon costs on Australian trade exposed industries and which simply has the effect of reducing their competiveness and over time driving investment and jobs offshore to countries with no price on carbon. Exporting the emissions is as pointless as exporting the jobs is economically destructive. And that is why when we were in Government we proposed an ETS which would have required emissions intensive, trade exposed industries to maintain global best practice in terms of emissions, but would otherwise have exempted them from the scheme until such time as the countries with which they competed had a comparable carbon price. This common sense approach has been abandoned apparently by Mr Rudd and only on Friday he declared he was committed to imposing a heavy carbon price on Australia’s LNG industry, which of course produces the world’s cleanest fossil fuel. Remember every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted in Australia in making LNG saves eight tonnes of CO2 when it is burned in China instead of coal. Now our ETS must be carefully and responsibly designed. We do not believe the design can be responsibly completed prior to the end of next year by which time we will know what President Obama’s own ETS is likely to look like and above all what the nations of the world are likely to commit to at the Copenhagen Summit. That is why we believe the appropriate start date for an ETS is not before 2011. Our first year of Opposition has been a time for reflection and for renewal. We have heard the lessons of the 2007 election loud and clear. WorkChoices is dead. The people have spoken. We are working hard on new policies. A particular focus is tax. In our view we should aim for tax to be lower, fairer and simpler.  And we are working closely with Henry Ergas and others to achieve those objectives. In that context, as we discuss the possibility of further fiscal stimuluses, our view is that the most effective fiscal stimulus is a cut in taxation. It achieves the same objective of putting money into people’s pockets as grants do, but at the same time it provides real incentives for work, for investment, for employment. While policies will change over time, not least in response to the events of the day, our values are enduring. We stand for freedom in a fair society. We believe that government’s duty is to enable you to do your best.  That is the duty of government. Mr Rudd view of government is that it is there to tell you what is best. We recognise that the prosperity of this country has not been created by governments but by the energy and the enterprise of millions of Australians.  Very few of the men and women who will ensure Australia comes through this economic storm are to be found in government. They are in thousands of businesses, large and small. It is their commitment and above all their confidence that is vital to our continued prosperity. Last time I spoke to the Press Club I described Mr Rudd’s style as “Morris Iemma comes to Canberra”. Residents of New South Wales know what years of Labor spin, political stunts and economic mismanagement deliver.  Mr Rudd has had some good reviews lately – well so did Mr Carr and after eleven years what had he achieved other than an album full of glowing headlines? Australia deserves a government that is capable of making the right decisions in the national interest – based on sound, experienced economic judgement. That is the government we are committed to offer Australian people in 2010. Thank you.adminTue, 25 Nov 2008 02:28:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:17http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/18/Rudd-must-backflip-on-bungled-bank-guarantees.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=18http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=18&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/18/Rudd-must-backflip-on-bungled-bank-guarantees.aspxThe Prime Minister and Treasurer have now been delivered a clear message from both the major banks and the Opposition that the Government must fix its bungled wholesale term funding and bank deposit guarantees. Australia’s major banks (AFR, 21/11, p1) and the Opposition are jointly calling on the Government to: present legislation to provide for an appropriation to give effect to the wholesale term funding guarantee for Australian deposit-taking institutions; and wind back the unlimited bank deposit guarantee from $1 million to a cap much closer to that proposed by the Coalition. Had the Government taken up the Opposition’s offer of bipartisanship these serious policy mistakes could have been avoided, and the necessity for us and the major banks to pressure the Government publicly averted. As the Opposition has consistently stated over the last month, most recently on Monday, there is an urgent need for appropriation legislation to enable the speedy payout of any guarantee that is called upon – this being essential to properly give force to the guarantee.  Unless the guarantee is backed with an appropriation, the banks will not receive the benefit of the guarantee when raising funds in international money markets and neither will millions of customers through lower interest rates, fees and charges. While not legally necessary to make the guarantee effective, it is desirable for transparency and accountability that the legislation also provide for a sunset date, a commitment for the guarantee to be on commercial terms, and appropriate reference to supervision by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. I also noted on Monday that the Opposition would facilitate the speedy passage of the necessary legislation, but we required early notification and discussion with the Government to ensure the efficacy of the guarantee. To date, I have not received a reply from the Government.adminSat, 22 Nov 2008 02:52:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:18http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/100/Address-at-the-HMAS-Sydney-Memorial-Service.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=100http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=100&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/100/Address-at-the-HMAS-Sydney-Memorial-Service.aspx Source: Queens Park Geraldton The man to whom we have come to pay our respects today once walked among us.  He was one of our sons, and one of our mates. He joined with his shipmates in taking on the tyrants of the world. He did so bravely. He asked for no quarter. He stood up to the greatest enemies freedom had ever faced and above all he stood up as all sailors do to the magnificence, the omnipotence of the ocean. It is said there are no atheists in a foxhole. I don’t believe there are any atheists on the deck of a warship on the mighty ocean when they recognise that their fierce guns and their powerful engines are as nothing compared to that mighty, primeval, often cruel creation – the ocean itself. No doubt he went to sea looking for adventure, patriotism, serving his country, seeing the world. He recognised the brutalities of war; he recognised the risk of death, the risk of defeat. But he went there filled with optimism and courage and looked forward to a life after battle, a life after the victories with his family and his friends, living a life of peaceful contentment. A life that was cut short in that cruel battle. And so many of you today lost fathers and loved ones, shipmates, in that terrible battle. So we remember him and we remember all of the men who sank with the Sydney that day, all 645 of them, and all the other sailors who have served Australia in wars defending our freedom. These were deeply troubling times. We know that, in that threatening world, he loved his country, and saw in Australia freedoms and values he should fight to preserve. So he rose to the challenge history had set for him. He sailed the world, under our flag. He saw war in all of its fury, the ocean in all of its magnificence and cruelty but he did not flinch. He came home a hero, at a time when this nation was in its greatest need of heroes. And then came that awful day of November the 19th, 1941. Keeping watch on our sea approaches, he saw on the horizon a ship that should not have been there and was not what it appeared to be. As a part of that crew of 645 brave Australian seamen, he set off in pursuit; never to return. The man to whom we pay our respects today died in our name. Not only for the Australia he knew, but for the Australia still to come. And that is why we honour him, and all who lie at rest today having served our nation. They were all of them our mates, and they died in our name. And that is why the unknown sailor and all sailors will be forever in our hearts.adminThu, 20 Nov 2008 04:38:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:100http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/19/HMAS-Sydney-Memorial-Service.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=19http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=19&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/19/HMAS-Sydney-Memorial-Service.aspxE&OE………… The man to whom we have come to pay our respects today once walked among us.  He was one of our sons, and one of our mates. He joined with his shipmates in taking on the tyrants of the world. He did so bravely. He asked for no quarter. He stood up to the greatest enemies freedom had ever faced and above all he stood up as all sailors do to the magnificence, the omnipotence of the ocean. It is said there are no atheists in a foxhole. I don’t believe there are any atheists on the deck of a warship on the mighty ocean when they recognise that their fierce guns and their powerful engines are as nothing compared to that mighty, primeval, often cruel creation – the ocean itself. No doubt he went to sea looking for adventure, patriotism, serving his country, seeing the world. He recognised the brutalities of war; he recognised the risk of death, the risk of defeat. But he went there filled with optimism and courage and looked forward to a life after battle, a life after the victories with his family and his friends, living a life of peaceful contentment. A life that was cut short in that cruel battle. And so many of you today lost fathers and loved ones, shipmates, in that terrible battle. So we remember him and we remember all of the men who sank with the Sydney that day, all 645 of them, and all the other sailors who have served Australia in wars defending our freedom. These were deeply troubling times. We know that, in that threatening world, he loved his country, and saw in Australia freedoms and values he should fight to preserve. So he rose to the challenge history had set for him. He sailed the world, under our flag. He saw war in all of its fury, the ocean in all of its magnificence and cruelty but he did not flinch. He came home a hero, at a time when this nation was in its greatest need of heroes. And then came that awful day of November the 19th, 1941. Keeping watch on our sea approaches, he saw on the horizon a ship that should not have been there and was not what it appeared to be. As a part of that crew of 645 brave Australian seamen, he set off in pursuit; never to return. The man to whom we pay our respects today died in our name. Not only for the Australia he knew, but for the Australia still to come. And that is why we honour him, and all who lie at rest today having served our nation. They were all of them our mates, and they died in our name. And that is why the unknown sailor and all sailors will be forever in our hearts.adminThu, 20 Nov 2008 03:04:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:19http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/20/Assistance-for-the-people-of-South-East-Queensland.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=20http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=20&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/20/Assistance-for-the-people-of-South-East-Queensland.aspxThe federal Opposition strongly supports the measures announced today by the Government to provide financial assistance to the people of South East Queensland affected by Sunday’s devastating storms. The one off payments of $1000 for adults and $400 for each child are appropriate and the Government should stand ready to provide further direct assistance if it is considered necessary. The activation of the Commonwealth Disaster Plan and the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements and the deployment of ADF personnel to the area is also welcomed and supported by the Opposition. The thoughts of all Australians are with those families whose lives have been turned upside down by Sunday’s storm. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the Hon Julie Bishop MP will travel to Brisbane tomorrow to visit the affected areas with the Member for Ryan, Mr Michael Johnson MP.adminWed, 19 Nov 2008 03:11:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:20http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/21/Wholesale-Term-Funding-Guarantee.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=21http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=21&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/21/Wholesale-Term-Funding-Guarantee.aspxThe Rudd Government must immediately present legislation to authorise the provision of wholesale term funding guarantees to Australian banks. Without legislation the guarantees will not be effective commercially or practically. The Opposition will facilitate the speedy passage of the necessary legislation. But the Government should circulate the legislation for the consideration of all parties this week and enable the Opposition to discuss it fully with the Government. The legislation should include provisions that deal with a sunset date and a commitment to the guarantee being provided on commercial terms.  It should take into account any further or additional prudential supervision that may be required; the role of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in this process should be explicit.  There should be a provision in the legislation to require the immediate tabling in Parliament of any guarantees given by the Government indicating the amount guaranteed and the institution involved; transparency is paramount given the potential size of the guarantees.  This would have been much easier to resolve had the Government acted in the bipartisan manner we proposed several months ago and sat down with us to discuss these measures collaboratively. They instead urged us, in the Deputy Prime Minister’s words, “to just get out of the way” because we were, as the Treasurer said, “completely irrelevant.”  So much for bipartisanship. Despite this the Opposition is prepared to work cooperatively with the Government and urges it to present any proposed legislation to the Opposition this week. For nearly a month now, the Opposition has urged the Government to make its wholesale term funding guarantee arrangements the subject of legislation. The Government has rejected this suggestion and affirmed, as recently as last Thursday in Question Time, that it proposed to implement the wholesale term funding guarantee without any legislation. Two facts are acknowledged by both the Government and the Opposition. First, the wholesale term funding guarantee involves the Commonwealth taking on very substantial contingent liabilities. Indeed MYEFO describes them as “unquantifiable”.  Second, while the Commonwealth can grant the guarantee administratively (without legislation), it cannot pay any moneys pursuant to such a guarantee without the Parliament passing an appropriation bill; in short, the Government might be able to write a cheque but without the approval of the Parliament, it cannot be cashed. The Government’s position, therefore, seems to be that Parliament should be ignored when the decision to assume “unquantifiably” large liabilities is taken. So much for democracy. But this is very much in the style of a Government that has refused to debate its response to the global financial crisis in the Parliament and is yet to deliver a coherent answer to any question asked of it about its response. But if arguments about democracy and accountability to the Parliament are of no importance to Mr Rudd, there is another reason why legislation is vital – a reason the Government has either wilfully, or incompetently, ignored. For a Government guarantee to be given a AAA credit rating, the Government’s obligation to pay on the guarantee must be, in the words of Standard & Poors, “unconditional, irrevocable and timely”. This is no more than common sense – the beneficiary of a guarantee wants to know that if a default occurs he will get his money quick smart. Without legislation, any payment on the proposed Government guarantee will be conditional on an appropriation bill being passed. It will not be timely – who is to say how long Parliament may take to pass the appropriation bill; for example, the Parliament may be in recess. The consequence of the Government’s bungling of yet another aspect of its response to the global financial crisis is that the wholesale term funding guarantee, which is designed to facilitate Australian banks borrowing in global wholesale markets, will not effectively achieve its purpose. Australian banks will lose out, as will the millions of Australians who depend on them for finance. It is worth noting that other countries are dealing with this matter by legislation, notably the United Kingdom. There are only two sitting weeks left this year. The Government has wasted a lot of time getting this matter wrong, now it must move swiftly to get it right.   It is time for Labor to put party politics aside and work cooperatively with the Coalition in the nation’s interest.adminTue, 18 Nov 2008 03:16:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:21http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/101/Economic-Security-Package-Bill.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=101http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=101&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/101/Economic-Security-Package-Bill.aspx Mr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (4.51 pm)—In 1918 Teddy Roosevelt wrote in the Kansas City Star words which are very apt for this parliament today: To announce that there must be no criticism of the President… is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. What we saw just a few moments ago was the government using its numbers in this House to prevent the Opposition raising and debating a matter of public importance, that matter of public importance being the  government’s response to the global financial crisis— probably the most critical public issue of our time. The Leader of the House, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, led the charge to prevent that debate being had. Just a few seconds ago in the debate here the member for Braddon encouraged the opposition not to engage in nitpicking, by which he means asking questions. When that absurd, patronising remark was greeted with laughter, as it inevitably must be, he said, ‘You may laugh.’ He is happy to let us laugh but the government is not prepared to allow us to debate a matter of public importance—the matter of the greatest public importance today. While we support this legislation, while we support this fiscal stimulus and we will vote for it, and the government says you should look at what the opposition does—and we will vote for it, it will have our support and it will go through the House and it will go through the Senate with our support— nonetheless it is our duty to raise the issues of concern that we have with this and with every other action on the part of the government. The Prime Minister seems to believe that it is somehow or other treasonable to question any policy decision of his. He has swallowed the Maoist doctrine to the absolute limit. It is not good enough simply to vote for legislation. You are not even allowed to raise a question—even the smallest question. Nothing less than absolute grovelling obedience is good enough for Chairman Rudd. This is a democracy and this is a parliament, and from the time this global financial crisis went into the most challenging phase after the collapse of Lehman Brothers we have consistently reached out to the government and offered to work with it on a bipartisan basis. But what does that mean? To the Prime Minister ‘bipartisanship’ means lying down and letting the government walk over the top of you. To use the phrase that the Deputy Prime Minister uses repeatedly, ‘Get out of the way—just get out of the way.’ That is what they think of the opposition. The Treasurer described the opposition as ‘completely irrelevant’—his words not mine. That is the regard they have for the democratic process. To us, bipartisanship means being prepared to sit down and work through these problems together. We are prepared to do this. Of course we cannot be bipartisan all the time. We are in a political contest and there are two sides to this parliament. But we are prepared to work with the government on this and those offers of bipartisanship have been rejected—and rejected contemptuously—  to the extent that we get the absurdity that the government, in a rush, without even troubling to bring the Reserve Bank into the room, without even talking directly to the Reserve Bank governor, made a  decision to have an unlimited deposit guarantee. We are the only nation in the world to do that other than, I believe, Ireland. The Treasurer, I note, said that  Germany had, but he was wrong there. Germany did not have an unlimited deposit guarantee in the way we did—not at all. The government did this. The Prime Minister did this. He told the world that he had acted in the closest consultation with the Governor of the Reserve Bank but had not spoken to him. He had had the time to bring the camera crews in and to roll up his sleeves. He talked about that yesterday. Do you remember, Mr Deputy Speaker? He loves talking about rolling up his sleeves. They came in and took a picture of him with his sleeves rolled up, although there were some shots with his sleeves rolled down which made me think that maybe they came in when his sleeves were rolled down and then he had to send them out again so he could roll them up. So he was very fastidious about how he appeared, but he would not, could not, speak to the people from the Reserve Bank who knew the most about the issues, the distortions and the problems that an unlimited deposit guarantee would have. Within a few days the deposit guarantee started to create enormous distortions, and by the Friday of that week—five days later—the Reserve Bank had put pen to paper and was begging the government to act. The Reserve Bank governor wrote to Ken Henry and said, ‘We are going round and round on this.’ He said, ‘There must be a cap—and the lower the better.’ The Chief Executive of Westpac, Gail Kelly, said that the cap should be $100,000. She has no chance of that happening because $100,000 was the level we recommended, and the one prediction I am prepared to make is that the Prime Minister will never adopt anything that has been recommended by the opposition. The distortions have been considerable. We have seen around 270,000 Australian accounts in mortgage trusts and cash management trusts frozen as a result of this unlimited deposit guarantee. We have seen the finance sector that is responsible for financing the bulk of automobile sales in Australia not being able to refinance themselves and therefore not being able to advance money for the purchase of motor cars. The knock-on effects in the motor industry at the retail level and ultimately at the manufacturing level and in components manufacturing and so forth are gigantic. This has been a direct consequence of the unlimited deposit guarantee. We do not suggest that the government intended to have these consequences. We do not suggest that this was their deliberate plan to create additional economic hardship. We know we are dealing with a global financial crisis. The Prime Minister, who loves three letter acronyms, describes the crisis as a GFC. The real issue is not that he has acted in response to the GFC but what the implications are of what he probably does not call, but ought to call, the KFC—Kevin’s financial crisis. It is the KFC that we are debating here because, while the government can say it has acted, the real point is that in ts actions it has been, to the best of my knowledge, the only developed country whose government has made the global financial crisis worse in its own territory. There is no question that, if the deposit guarantee had not been unlimited, the distortion would have been less, there would have been fewer people whose savings were frozen and finance companies would have been better able to finance their own books and be able to support their customers in the motor industry and enable cars to be sold. All of that is perfectly clear. When we raise issues like this, the government says that we are being inconsistent or that we are nitpicking. But the government itself abandoned the unlimited guarantee—not, I might say, until after the email from the Reserve Bank governor to Dr Henry was published on the front page of the Australian newspaper. They needed a fair bit of prodding to admit they had made a mistake. Even then, they reduced it to $1 million and will not take any note of the advice they are getting from the chief executive of Westpac or, indeed, of similar advice to make drastic changes which they are getting from the Chairman of the Commonwealth Bank. So why do we get this pattern of poor decision making? Is it just because they are so concerned with being swift and decisive that they cannot tell the difference between ‘swift and decisive’ and ‘rushed and bungled’? The answer is that the government’s approach to economic policy is purely political. They have no economic policy at all; it is all politics. Let us cast our minds back to a year ago, 12 November 2007, when the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins, delivered a speech which warned of the effect of the subprime crisis. This is what he said: The collapse of the sub-prime US lending market … is now having reverberations around the world. And all of these things will buffet global inflation, they will buffet our economy, they will buffet exchange rates, they will affect growth and job opportunities. They will require careful management on the Budget, on tax, on structural policy, on industrial relations, on competitiveness, on investment. That was very good advice. Yet when the government came to office they paid no regard to the subprime crisis at all. They only had one objective—and it was a political objective—which was simply to make a case against the Howard government’s economic management. But the problem was that all of the numbers were so good. All Labor’s debt had been paid off, the budget was in surplus and had been for many years, unemployment was at historic lows and growth was strong. What could they find? Ah, yes: inflation had come above the Reserve Bank’s target range. It was not by much—just by a bit. It had happened before; it had been managed before. But there it was; it had gone above the range. So they threw all of their rhetoric and political bile onto that issue and said that inflation was out of control. ‘The inflation genie is out of the bottle’ were the famous words that will haunt the Treasurer for as long as he is a member of this House. He said that before the Reserve Bank met. He egged the Reserve Bank to put up interest rates. The Prime Minister, not to be outdone, said that an ‘inflation monster’ was wreaking havoc across the land—all of which inevitably raised inflationary  expectations. What else could it do? If the Treasurer of the Commonwealth tells you inflation is out of control, what do you think? Do you think inflation is a problem? Of course you do. They talked the problem up and put upward pressure on interest rates, and so we had at the beginning of this year two interest rate rises. What was the opposition saying? We, who get accused of being economically irresponsible or inconsistent— what did we say? We said that there was likely to be considerable downward pressure, if you like, on economic activity coming from the subprime crisis in the United States. We said that the Reserve Bank should be careful to stay its hand. We encouraged them not to raise rates but to stay their hands and watch developments elsewhere in the world. But that did not suit the political agenda of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. Members on the other side listening to this can check to see if I am wrong. They went out and were the only head of government and Treasurer in the world who actively talked up inflation at that time. Everywhere else in the world, governments were recognising that the global credit crisis was likely to make economic times harder. It was likely to make credit less available, and that in itself is obviously going to slow economic activity. But no, here in Australia, our government went straight ahead in its war on inflation to slow economic growth. They talk about consistency. We were completely consistent right through that period. But then the government, as part of their war on inflation, said that they were going to have a swingeing budget with big cuts and it was going to hurt. An anxious nation waited for the axe to fall. What did the opposition say? The opposition were consistent. We said the budget should not be making big cuts in spending that would have an effect of putting downward pressure on aggregate demand and economic activity. For the same reason, we encouraged the Reserve Bank not to put up rates. We noted that any cut in spending that was going to haveany material impact on inflation, and therefore aggregate demand, would have to be at least half a per cent of GDP—$5 billion or $6 billion—and we said that would be wrong. We were criticised for that—we were spendthrifts! But then the budget came out and it was far from being a contractionary budget. The best that my old firm Goldman Sachs could say about it was ‘at least it did not make inflation worse’. So there was a case where the government failed to recognise a worsening global credit crisis and actually went out of its way to talk up inflation and threaten big cuts in the budget—which it backed away from—but still did nothing to stimulate the economy. That went all the way through until we came to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the middle of September. Then, of course, the penny dropped. It was a very large coin that dropped. It was a very big bang when Lehman Brothers went down. The problems of systemic risk could not be avoided or ignored by anybody. We recognised these challenges and we recommended that the deposit guarantee with a cap of $20,000 that had been announced by the government, which we certainly supported, should in these times be increased to $100,000. That was a reasonable suggestion; it was in line with what many other nations were doing. If you look at the United States, its deposit guarantee had been $100,000 until it was recently increased to $250,000. It had been $100,000 for many years. The British have introduced a cap of £50,000. In most countries in Europe it is ¼was perfectly in line with global precedent and it was designed to be set at a level that was high enough to give the vast majority of household and small business depositors—retail depositors if you like—comfort but not so high as to create distortions. That was our proposal. That was brushed aside and the government went for an unlimited guarantee. How did they justify an unlimited deposit guarantee? The Prime Minister said again and again, ‘If we had adopted the opposition’s recommendation of a $100,000 cap’—which is what is being recommended by the chief executive of Westpac— ’then 40 per cent of deposits in total value would be left’—in his words; not mine—’unprotected.’ The vast bulk of those deposits is in the big four banks—the AA banks; among the most secure, stable, best regulated banks in the world. Again, to make a political point, what he did was suggest to the Australian public that deposits in every bank, no matter how big that bank may be, no matter what its ratings are, would be unsafe unless they had the protection of a government guarantee. So I am here today to say I support this legislation. As I have said, the opposition will support it. So the government can look at what we do and they will see we are giving it the support that we promised we would. But we will not back away from our obligation to hold the government to account. The Assistant Treasurer in the House earlier today quoted a remark I had made. He quoted me as saying, ‘We will give the government assistance.’ And we do offer to give the government assistance. We offer them advice. They ignore it; they treat it with contempt. They ignored our advice on the deposit guarantee just as they have ignored our advice on the wholesale term funding guarantee. As honourable members know, the government is administratively able to give guarantees to banks in respect of their borrowings offshore in the wholesale market. It is able to do that. This could involve taking on contingent liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars—an enormous scale. The Treasurer said that they would be detailed in MYEFO. They are not. MYEFO just says that they are unquantifiable. I do not regard that as detailing anything. But because the government cannot honour a guarantee without an appropriation bill being passed it means that those people who are seeking the benefit of the guarantee—the investors, the lenders—are not going to be able to get a clean legal opinion. So by its refusal to act prudently, by its refusal to heed the advice we have given, the government is likely to make the funding that it is seeking to guarantee either unavailable or much more expensive. We stand ready to assist the government. We stand ready to approach this issue on a bipartisan basis but it requires genuine bipartisanship, not a slavish adherence to the sayings, the dictums, of chairman Rudd. (Time expired) adminFri, 14 Nov 2008 04:39:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:101http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/103/Suspension-of-Standing-and-Sessional-Orders.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=103http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=103&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/103/Suspension-of-Standing-and-Sessional-Orders.aspx Source: Parliament House Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Mr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (3.10 pm)— I move: That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition from moving the following motion immediately: That this House censures the Prime Minister for failing to deny allegations that he or his office leaked information about a high security telephone conversation between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. In particular that: (1) This security breach compromises the credibility and integrity of Australia’s diplomatic relationships with key international partners; and  (2) The Prime Minister has failed, over numerous days, to fully explain to the Australian people the details in relation to the leak and his involvement in it; and That the matter be referred to the Australian Federal Police for a full investigation as to whether there has been any breach of the Crimes Act or other relevant legislation. The urgency of this motion is very clear. We have seen a Prime Minister who has been given the opportunity not once, not twice but again and again to deny that he leaked a self-serving account of a conversation between himself and the President of the United States— an account so self-serving that it presented him as a diplomatic encyclopaedia, a font of all knowledge, and the President of the United States, the chief executive of our greatest ally, as a fool. That was the impression he set out to create; and he leaked that to the Australian newspaper, which naturally gave it great importance. Then when he got the Australian newspaper, did the Prime Minister have second thoughts? No, he was pleased with the outcome because it gratified his vanity. It made him feel clever. He thought, ‘That’s good, people will know how smart I am.’ He did not care that he offended the President of the United States. He did not think that around the world prime ministers and presidents, chancellors, treasurers and officials would say, ‘You can’t talk to the Prime Minister of Australia— you can’t have a conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia unless you want to read about it on the front page.’ It was not until the White House, in an absolutely unprecedented step, went on the record in the Washington Post three days later and denied it, and the issue was taken up here. The Prime Minister did not deny that he had leaked the information but sought to deny that he alone had been aware of the existence of the G20. He tried to walk away from the libel of the President of the United States but he never denied that he was responsible for that leak. Let us consider what the Australian article said. This was not just a little bit of gossip that was picked up. It tells us: KEVIN Rudd was entertaining guests in the lounge room at Kirribilli House in Sydney when an aide told him George W. Bush was on the telephone. It was 10.40pm on Friday, October 10. The article goes on: The Prime Minister, still clad in the suit he had worn to a business dinner in the city— he works so hard that he had not had time to change into his black tie; he normally has dinner in formal wear, of course— was polite and calm. “Have another drink while I take this call,”—  ever the gracious host— Rudd told his guests as he slipped into the adjacent study. The reporter wrote: What followed was an extraordinary exchange in which Rudd— the great polymath, he who knows all, told: … the most powerful man in the world that a plan to address the global financial crisis through the G7 group of leading industrialised nations was wrong. Rudd, the former diplomat and Mandarin speaker— Was he speaking Mandarin to the President of the United States? It is amazing what you discover when you read these articles with great care. He:  … advised Bush that the G7 plan … was out of touch with the reality of the Asia-Pacific century. The article goes on to say: Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say: ‘What’s the G20?’ During the spirited 30-minute discussion that followed, Rudd continually brought Bush back to his contention that political imperatives and economic common sense demanded the involvement of China in any response to the crisis. … … … Rudd’s view on China was probably better informed than he let on to the US President. He was modest! It goes on to say: Just four days earlier, the fluent Mandarin speaker had discussed the global turmoil on the telephone with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The Prime Minister’s fingerprints are all over this. Every paragraph—every letter—is dripping with his DNA. This is his work. But we have given him every opportunity to deny it, and he has failed to do so. There has never been a more serial or more eloquent plea of guilty heard than the Prime Minister’s on this charge of leaking the conversation with the US President. That demonstrates yet again that the Prime Minister’s claim to be a proficient diplomat is hollow. This is the Prime Minister who on his first international outing went out of his way to gratuitously offend Japan. This is the Prime Minister who fails to recognise that the people of the United States have an extraordinary respect for their head of state; for the office of the President. Even though a president may be unpopular—and George W Bush’s ratings are far from high—until he steps down from office every American will regard him as their commander in chief and as someone who demands respect. What the Prime Minister has done in his vanity, in his naivety, in his lack of trust, in his lack of  professionalism  nd in his betrayal of Australia’s reputation is offend not just George W Bush—not just one president— but the people of the United States. President Obama and presidents in years to come will, when being called by a Prime Minister of Australia, be told by somebody from the state department—the same department that called in our ambassador for a dressing down; the same department whose ambassador made a personal protest about this to the Prime Minister—’Do not forget that you can’t trust those Australians; remember what Kevin Rudd did to George W Bush.’ The Prime Minister has trashed our reputation. Many of the journalists watching us today have discussed this and heard the views of the diplomatic community in this city. Right around Canberra there are diplomats unbelieving that the Prime Minister could do this and repeating this comment: ‘You can’t say anything to this man unless you want to read about it the press.’ Confidence is a fragile thing. We have seen in the financial world how readily it has been shattered and how hard it is to restore. We have seen confidence undermined in the financial markets around the world. But, just as with the world of finance, so with the world of politics and diplomacy. Nobody will speak to the Prime Minister of Australia now unless they want to read about it in the press. He has demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to keep confidential a conversation with the most powerful world leader. Every other head of government—such as the Prime Minister of England, the President of France and the Prime Minister of Italy—will say, ‘If he is going to peddle a self-serving story about a conversation with the President of the United States to denigrate the President’s reputation and inflate his own sense of self-importance then what will he do to me?’ Around the world, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, is marked ‘not to be trusted’. This has seen a shocking betrayal of our nation’s reputation.adminWed, 12 Nov 2008 04:42:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:103http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/102/Armistice-Day.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=102http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=102&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/102/Armistice-Day.aspxMr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (2.03 pm)—Mr Speaker, on indulgence: I wish to associate the opposition with the remarks of the Prime Minister and compliment him on his very eloquent address at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial. When we look back on the First World War at the scale of the casualties the horror is mind boggling—almost beyond our comprehension. The numbers were staggering in a world, a society, much greater than the country from which those brave fallen men came. We contemplate an Australia a quarter the size of what it is today in population and then the horror of Fromelles, that most cataclysmic of Australian military campaigns, where 5,533 Australians would die between one nightfall and the next. It was possibly the worst 24 hours in our nation’s history. We think of the mighty struggles undertaken and the thousands of men whose lives were lost to gain a few metres ground, only to lose it again. We think of Villers-Bretonneux, the village where Australian and French forces had to fight literally door-to-door to drive their enemy into retreat. And we think of the 1,200 Anzacs who died to rescue that village, to liberate it, three years to the day after the landing at Gallipoli. Over 320,000 Australians volunteered for the First World War—this from a nation of five million. There were 61,000 killed and 155,000 wounded. ‘There were so many of them but we never saw them,’ wrote Les Carlyon in The Great War, his epic study of the Australian deployment to the Western Front. We never really knew them, or perhaps never knew enough about their lives or deaths. What we have are memories: faded photographs, bits and pieces brought back from the war. Perhaps the one war relic that is most evocative for me is a German button brought back by my grandfather. He no doubt found it on the battlefield. I remember it has written on it ‘Gott mit uns’: God with us. I wonder  sometimes whether that was a proud boast by the aggressor nation saying, ‘God is on our side and not on the side of our opponents,’ or whether it was perhaps just a prayer—a silent prayer every day as that soldier buttoned up his greatcoat, hoping that God was indeed with him in the horror of the trenches and indeed with the men he was fighting against on the other side. The Prime Minister spoke today about peace, and that of course is what we must never lose sight of. I am reminded too of Psalm 34, where King David wrote, ‘Seek peace and pursue it’. It is not enough just to lookfor it or be aware of the virtues of peace, to be in favour of peace; we must pursue it. In that passage, in the original Hebrew, ‘pursue’ means relentlessly, tirelessly chasing, with the passion of the hunter. That is the challenge that comes to leaders in every age: not simply to be vigilant, not simply to stand up for peace, not simply to seek it, but to chase after it, to pursue it relentlessly, tirelessly, with all our heart.  adminWed, 12 Nov 2008 04:40:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:102http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/22/Remembrance-Day.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=22http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=22&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/22/Remembrance-Day.aspxI wish to associate the opposition with the remarks of the Prime Minister and compliment him on his very eloquent address at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial. When we look back on the horror of the First World War—the scale of the casualties—the horror is mind boggling, almost beyond our comprehension. The numbers are staggering in a world, a society, much greater than the country from which those brave fallen men came. We contemplate an Australia a quarter the size of what it is today in terms of population and then the horror of Fromelles, that most cataclysmic of Australian military campaigns, where 5,533 Australians would die between one nightfall and the next. It was possibly the worst 24 hours in our nation’s history. We think of the mighty struggles undertaken and the thousands of men whose lives were lost to gain a few metres ground, only to lose it again. We think of Villers-Bretonneux, the village where Australian and French forces had to fight literally door-to-door to drive their enemy into retreat. And we think of the 1,200 Anzacs who died to rescue that village, to liberate it, three years to the day after the landing at Gallipoli. Over 320,000 Australians volunteered for the First World War, this from a nation of five million. There were 61,000 killed and 155,000 wounded. ‘There were so many of them but we never saw them,’ wrote Les Carlyon in The Great War, his epic study of the Australian deployment to the Western Front. We never really knew them, or perhaps never knew enough about their lives or deaths. What we have are memories: faded photographs, bits and pieces brought back from the war. Perhaps the one war relic that is most evocative for me is a German button brought back by my grandfather. He no doubt found it on the battlefield. I remember it has written on it ‘Gott mit uns’: God with us. I wonder sometimes whether that was a proud boast by the aggressor nation saying, ‘God is on our side and not on the side of our opponents,’ or whether it was perhaps just a prayer—a silent prayer every day as that soldier buttoned up his greatcoat, hoping that God was indeed with him in the horror of the trenches and indeed with the men he was fighting against on the other side. The Prime Minister spoke today about peace, and that of course is what we must never lose sight of. I am reminded too of Psalm 34, where King David wrote ‘seek peace and pursue it’. It is not enough just to look for it or be aware of the virtues of peace, to be in favour of peace; we must pursue it. In that passage, in the original Hebrew, ‘pursue’ means relentlessly, tirelessly chasing, with the passion of the hunter. That is the challenge that comes to leaders in every age: not simply to be vigilant, not simply to stand up for peace, not simply to seek it but to chase after it, to pursue it relentlessly, tirelessly, with all our heart.adminWed, 12 Nov 2008 03:42:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:22http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/104/American-and-New-Zealand-Elections.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=104http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=104&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/104/American-and-New-Zealand-Elections.aspx Source: Parliament House Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-style-parent:""; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Mr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (2.05 pm)—Mr Speaker, on indulgence: on behalf of the opposition, I join the Prime Minister in congratulating President-elect Barack Obama on this historic election victory. The Prime Minister referred to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech given 45 years ago. A speech it was; but in truth it was a prayer. Dr King said that he looked forward to the day when his little children would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. When he gave that speech, the 44th President of the United States, as he shortly will be, was only two-years old. He was not one of Dr King’s children, but he was the child of that prayer and the child of those dreams. And what magnificent dreams. Who among us would have ever thought that we would see the day a black man was elected to be President of the United States, a nation that has been riven by so much racial tension, so much violence and so much hatred. It has risen above all that and affirmed the greatest democracy in the world, affirmed the strength of its  diversity and affirmed its confidence in its democracy. And in so doing it has defied all of the critics who said that it was a racist nation and who said that its marbled halls of power were not open to black people; to people from minorities in the United States. It has truly been a magnificent day. We join with the government in congratulating President-elect Obama. Our countries have so much in common. It is not simply that the United States is the world’s leading democracy; it is not simply that it is our greatest ally; it is not simply that it must take the leadership role in so many of the great challenges facing the world—the global financial crisis, climate change, the war against terror and all of those great challenges. What we have in common, which Barack Obama personifies, is that we are two nations that define themselves by commitment to common political values. There is no person who can look into the mirror and say, ‘That is an Australian face,’ or ‘That is an American face.’ The United States is a nation of choice, a nation of immigration—just as our nation is. It is in that diversity that we find our strength. In that sense, Barack Obama reflects that diversity that is so key to our nation as well as his. In many respects, he is as much a citizen of the world as he will shortly be the first citizen of his nation. We share the great hope and optimism that President Obama will answer another call of Dr King, and that is to let freedom ring around the world. Mr TURNBULL (Wentworth—Leader of the Opposition) (2.10 pm)—Mr Speaker, on indulgence: we also join with the Prime Minister in congratulating John Key and the National Party of New Zealand on their historic election victory on Saturday night. New Zealand and Australia are, indeed, as close as any two nations can be. It is remarkable that our close friendship can transcend our competition on the sporting field, which occasionally does bring a bit of tension into the relationship. But I believe our relationship is stronger because it is forged in the fire of sporting contest, just as our friendship has been forged in the fire of war. Australia and New Zealand joined together in creating the name of Anzac, and that remarkable combination, which had its birth on the day that we celebrate as our most important day of remembrance of sacrifice, Anzac Day, reminds us of how close our two nations are. John Key is a highly capable man who will work tirelessly for his country’s reinvigoration and renewal. He is going to put his considerable professional experience working in the international financial markets to great use in his leadership of the New Zealand economy through these very difficult times. We look forward to a close working relationship with the new Prime Minister and his government. We wish him well in facing the very many challenges he will now confront as Prime Minister of New Zealand. We also want to join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to the contribution of the Rt Hon. Helen Clark to trans-Tasman relations throughout her nine years as Prime Minister of New Zealand. She has always been a stalwart friend of Australia and a strong advocate for her people. The former coalition government of course worked very closely with Helen Clark, particularly, as the Prime Minister noted, in the joint efforts in the Pacific islands and especially the Solomon Islands. So, with that, we join with the Prime Minister in congratulating the new Prime Minister of New Zealand and also in acknowledging our respect and gratitude for the efforts of his distinguished predecessor.adminTue, 11 Nov 2008 04:43:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:104http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/23/What-does-Mr-Rudd-have-to-hide.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=23http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=23&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/23/What-does-Mr-Rudd-have-to-hide.aspxThe Prime Minister today in Parliament twice refused to deny that he or his office were responsible for the damaging leak of false and misleading details of a private and confidential conversation with the US President on October 10. Mr Rudd has had two weeks since the publication on 25 October of an account of the conversation to explain to the Australian people how these details were leaked to the media. It further appears from Mr Rudd’s responses that no investigation has been instigated into this damaging breach of confidence. This contrasts sharply with extensive investigations launched into other recent security breaches: a Defence Department inquiry into the leaking of a hot issues briefing relating to entertainers visiting Afghanistan, including checking of emails of the Minister for Defence; and an Australian Federal Police internal investigation into the disclosure of sensitive files in Kathmandu, requiring the return to Australia of an AFP officer to assist the investigation. Clearly Mr Rudd applies one rule for his own office and another for the rest of the Government. Until Mr Rudd satisfactorily answers questions about how this leak occurred, he leaves in jeopardy the credibility and integrity of Australia’s formal diplomatic exchanges with key international partners. If Mr Rudd cannot be trusted to deal in confidence with sensitive discussions with world leaders, or comes to see it as his prerogative to brief adversely against other heads of government in order to generate publicity for himself, he is acting in a way that can only diminish the respect attached to the office of Prime Minister of Australia. adminTue, 11 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:23http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/25/Gillard-misleads-over-ABC-Learning-funding.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=25http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=25&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/25/Gillard-misleads-over-ABC-Learning-funding.aspxThe Deputy Prime Minister has today sought to claim the Coalition does not support the Government's $22 million funding package for ABC Learning. This is incorrect. As I stated when asked about this issue yesterday, we hope that the $22 million in funding will allow the company the breathing space to be able to sort out their affairs. Ms Gillard's suggestion that the Coalition does not support this measure reveals her determination to play politics even when it involves the concerns of mums and dads about ongoing child care for their kids. Again, as I said yesterday, there won't be one silver bullet to fix this situation, but a viable solution must be found to provide ongoing child care services for the very large number of families who rely on ABC Learning. adminMon, 10 Nov 2008 03:51:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:25http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/24/Malcolm-Turnbull-Congratulates-John-Key-on-Election-as-New-Zealand-Prime-Minister.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=24http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=24&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/24/Malcolm-Turnbull-Congratulates-John-Key-on-Election-as-New-Zealand-Prime-Minister.aspxOn behalf of the Federal Opposition I congratulate John Key and the National Party of New Zealand on their election win. John Key will bring not just political change to New Zealand, but also his considerable experience in the international financial markets – a background he will put to great use in these current challenging times. New Zealand and Australia are as close as two friends can be – our rivalry on the sporting field notwithstanding! It is vital to Australia that our trans-Tasman neighbour remain strong, energetic and engaged, in our region and the world, and I look forward to Prime Minister Key implementing his policies for reinvigoration and renewal. John Key and his Party is committed, as we are, to the paramount importance of individual freedom, the spirit of enterprise, and the need for responsible economic management by government . Although the challenges ahead will be demanding, I am confident John Key will prove as good as his word in getting the New Zealand economy back onto a strong growth path. I look forward to working closely with him to advance in the interests of both of our nations.  I also pay tribute to the contribution of the Rt Hon Helen Clark to trans-Tasman relations. Throughout  her years as Prime Minister of New Zealand, she has been a stalwart friend of Australia. adminMon, 10 Nov 2008 03:47:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:24http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/105/Address-to-the-Australian-Christian-Lobby.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=105&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/105/Address-to-the-Australian-Christian-Lobby.aspx At the outset I think it’s worth reflecting on the very good advice Jesus gave to politicians in the Sermon on the Mount; it’s very appropriate for an occasion like this. “Be careful not to parade your uprightness in public to attract attention; otherwise you will lose all reward from your Father in heaven”. And Jesus gave even better counsel for the public that politicians seek to represent and persuade to their point of view: “Beware of false prophets who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves. You will be able to tell them by their fruits.” And that is a very important text for politicians because ultimately the good we do is judged by the outcome. We demonstrate our values by the deeds we do for you in public life and the lives we lead, not by the virtues we protest that we might have. In other words, we should all focus on action and results. And remember too that a lot of great mistakes have been made with the best of intentions. Ultimately we get paid, in every respect, on results. But what drives us into public life? My friends it is passion, it is passion for public service. And I’ll dwell if I may for a moment on another passage which I’m sure you’re very familiar with from Psalm 34, “seek peace and pursue it.” It’s one of King David’s psalms, “seek peace and pursue it”. The English translation does not do it justice. The Psalms are of course poetry and there was a famous definition of poetry which I always liked which is ‘that which is lost in translation’. And there are some translations of that verse that are particularly inadequate. Because the Hebrew word for peace – shalom – is much more than what in English we refer to as peace, which is often just referred to as an absence of conflict, an absence of war. Is Australia at peace? Yes, because we’re not at war; we’re not being invaded, although we obviously do have our soldiers in action in different places around the world. Shalom means wellbeing; peace in the sense of contentment. It is almost welfare of the whole community, is really what that word means in that verse. But the most significant word in that one line of the Psalm is pursue. “Seek peace and pursue it.” What does pursue mean? Well pursue, the Hebrew word that is translated there is radaf. And that means the pursuit of the hunter. The relentless, unyielding, driving hunter. Chasing his or her quarry over hill, down dale, through the thickets, battling through the undergrowth, climbing over the rocks, determined to get their quarry. And so what the Psalmist is telling us here is that we should not simply be looking out for the social welfare, wellbeing, the commonweal, to use an old fashioned term that’s reflected in the name of our country. Not simply looking out for it, not simply being alert to it, but striving with all of our heart to do it. And in fact the Good News Bible in its translation perhaps comes a little bit closer to it – although I think still inadequately because as I said, poetry is what’s lost in translation – when it talks about striving for peace with all your heart. That perhaps is a little bit closer than the conventional translation. So that is what all of us in public life must seek to do: to look out for the public good, to seek to serve the people not in an administrative way, not in a bureaucratic way, not in a procedural way, but to reach out, to identify, with energy, with passion, with commitment, with zeal, the wrongs that need righting and go forth and address them. And it’s that energy, that passion for public service that it should inform all of our work, all of our work in politics and in public life. And that is why when school children come to see Parliament – and of course I think most school children in Australia do make a visit to Parliament House – when MPs like myself or Scott Morrison here, the Member for Cook, my friend and colleague, when we go and address the groups from the schools in our area many of us make two points. We say one, this place belongs to you. As it does; it’s the people’s parliament. And secondly we remind them that everything that we do in that place is designed to make Australia a better place for them to grow up in. In other words everything we do is focused on their future and on their wellbeing, on their shalom in the years ahead. Now we have had a remarkable week this week in politics. The election of Barack Obama is one of those extraordinary events. It’s like for a moment in time it felt as though the most anguished prayer for reconciliation had been fulfilled. Nobody can ever forget the speech of Martin Luther King, the ‘I have a dream’ speech. A prayer. It was a prayer as much as it was a speech. And to think that Martin Luther King’s ambitions not even 50 years ago seemed so far away in that time. You know when he said he looked forward to the day that his children, his little children, would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. When he said that I wonder did Dr King dream that one of his children or a young man about that age could actually be President? I don’t know. Let’s hope he did, let’s hope he did. But if that was a prayer, and it was a prayer, and it’s a prayer that has been made again and again, then the election of Senator Obama has fulfilled it, fulfilled it in super abundance. It is a remarkable event. Now of course Senator Obama is a human like all of us. He is a charismatic speaker, a remarkable man undoubtedly, with great God given gifts of eloquence, of leadership, of charisma. And no one in public life will fulfil every expectation and boy the expectations and hopes that are pinned on him are remarkable. But, nonetheless, it was a remarkable day and it reminds us my friends of the importance of freedom and really that is what I want to talk to you about. The importance of freedom, because it’s not for me to give a partisan speech today and I don’t intend to. But obviously I am the Leader of the Opposition, I’m the leader of the Liberal Party and we have a distinct political philosophy. Our policies on particular issues will change from time to time, not least because policies with the best of intentions will turn out to be unsuccessful and you have to start again. That’s life. But at the core of our philosophy is a commitment to freedom. Ultimately we believe that government’s role is to enable people to do their best, to enable them to exercise the free choice they have as individuals to make their choices, to lead their lives. And of course that cannot be done other than in a fair society, naturally. It can’t possibly be done without that. But enabling people to make their own choices, to be free, is the single biggest difference if you like between our side of politics and what we might call the more collectivist, the centre left and further left side of politics. And while Barack Obama is clearly from the centre left, there is no doubt about that, nonetheless his election is a demonstration of the power of a free society. A power of a free society, a great democracy, to step over the hatreds, the antagonisms, the resentments, the bitterness of hundreds of years of discriminations and racial tension, and to make that choice. And it’s a day I think that all of us should savour because whatever the outcome of his presidency might be – and we obviously wish him the best and he should be in our prayers, believe me, the world depends on him doing a great job – but whatever the result may be it has been a remarkable week, a remarkable healing moment in a troubled world. Now Samantha was talking earlier about families and marriage and she did well to do that. As many of you know, as Tony particularly knows because we were on the MRC together, marriage and families and demographic issues are a great passion of mine. There is no question that our nation, any nation is stronger if more people are married – and when I say married I mean formally married; and that doesn’t mean previously married, that means formally as in legally married – if they’re legally married and if more children are brought up by a father and a mother. An interesting piece of research I read years ago and incorporated in a lecture I gave at Sydney University a long time ago was that when you normalised, or standardised I suppose, samples of white American youth and black American youth – young males I’m talking about – for whether they had been brought up in households with a father, when you standardised that the rates of juvenile delinquency were very similar. And this is a point that many people have observed both in the United States in particular but also in our country. One of the greatest causes of childhood delinquency, juvenile delinquency, social disadvantage, is the breakdown of the family. Now we cannot make every marriage stay together, no one can do that. But what we can do, and Samantha is right, is to promote and encourage marriage, and recognise that marriage is a social good and that each of us has a vested interest in each other’s marriage. This is a very important point. In our respect for other people’s privacy we say ‘well, that’s their concern and it’s your concern’. People sort out their own lives and of course they must. But the reality is that society has a vested interest in strong families and strong marriages. Just like children are a social good. All of us have a vested interest in each other’s children and my friends none more so than the childless. Think about that, think about that. When I’m old and crotchety – I might be crotchety now – but when I’m old and I’m in need of government support and pensions and pharmaceutical benefits and all those things, it will not just be my children that will be paying taxes to support me, it will be your children too. So the fact is whether you look at it from a social, cultural, a spiritual point of view, or if you look at it from a hard headed economic point of view, you need to have strong families and we need to recognise that we all have a vested interest in other people’s families. So that is one of the reasons why we have on our side of politics – and I don’t suggest the other side doesn’t – just speaking for ourselves, we have a passionate commitment for the family, for the promotion of the family, for the protection of children and therefore the protection of children within the family. And that is something that we will pursue. That is part of the peace, part of that commonweal we will pursue with passion. With that passion of the hunter pursuing his quarry across the hills. Now one issue that I know many of you will be anxious about, as everyone is anxious about, is the global financial crisis. And it is one that has taxed policy makers everywhere around the world, and you might well ask why should we talk about this to a Christian gathering like this? Am I not delving into the affairs of mammon? The reality is that in fact the Gospels celebrate many things and I won’t trespass any more on the province of the clergy, but the Gospels celebrate many things, not least the importance of conviviality, that human experience of sharing a meal which of course we remember in our Eucharist. But also the Gospels; Jesus is full of very sensible advice on a whole range of matters including some business matters. One of the things that we have seen with the sub-prime crisis is people forgetting very basic principles: living within your means, not advancing large sums of money to people who cannot afford to repay it. Just remember this: what was the origin of this sub-prime crisis? Enormous amounts of money were advanced as housing loans in circumstances where people could not realistically afford to repay them unless a housing bubble continued to grow. In effect it was speculation. Now of course if the bubble keeps on growing everyone’s happy because asset inflation gets you out of it. But it was that failure to focus on some pretty old fashioned values that were at the core of the sub-prime crisis. And I think as we reflect, as the world reflects on the consequences of this global financial crisis we will come back to, again, to some very old fashioned values, that when I say old fashioned they’re really eternal values, perennial values of thrift, of saving, of personal responsibility. And that applies to individuals and of course it applies to companies and it applies to countries and nations. And that is why focused on those value, as we are, that is why in the years that we were in government we took advantage of the strong economic growth that we had and paid off Australia’s debt, paid off our federal government’s debt. So as we go into these difficult times, as Mr Rudd as Prime Minister leads Australia in these difficult times he has the great advantage of having no net debt at the federal level, of having plenty of money in the bank. His predecessors have stored away the fruits of previous harvests and he is now better situated than almost any other leader of a developed country, better situated to deal with these challenges. But having said that, the correct decisions have to be taken. And for our part we would like to work in a more bipartisan way with the Government and we have offered to do that. They have declined that offer and that’s their prerogative. Nonetheless the offer remains open, so in the meantime we will continue to make constructive and helpful, positive suggestions wherever we can. Let me conclude before we move to the questions. I’m sure you’ve got some good questions and comments for me to tax me here this Saturday morning in this beautiful hall. Let me just conclude with a reflection on the mystery of our faith. We must remember always that Jesus cut through complexity. He cut through complexity to the central mystery. The Lord’s Prayer, which for reasons best known to himself the Speaker suggested shouldn’t be part of our proceedings in parliament, and as you know we quickly opposed that as indeed did the Prime Minister. I’m very fond of the Speaker but I can only say, as we often do of our friends, I have no idea what he was thinking when he said that. The Lord’s Prayer, remember when Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer he gave us a simple prayer as an alternative to long and complex liturgies. Don’t pray with all of these long words and formulas and so forth, just cut through, cut through to the simplicity. It’s a very simple message. A simple message but not a simplistic one. As complex and mysterious as it is simple. Because when you – and I’m taking a metaphor from Lawrence Durrell for those that are familiar with his books about Alexandria – when you climb your way down the anchor chain, imagine you’re climbing down an anchor chain link by link, into the darkness of the water, getting closer to the mystery at the heart of your faith, what do we find there? We find love. That is what we find. As baffling, as incomprehensible, as overwhelming as love. That is what we find. That’s what Jesus left us. He left us peace, but it was the peace of love. Now we have all been the beneficiaries of love in our lives and without love our lives are empty and without love the nation’s life is empty. Everything we do in public service is for the love of this country and the people who dwell in it, and the land that we dwell on and dwell in. And I have been so lucky in my life to have had so much love. I could not tell you of all the love I’ve had. But I just want to tell you one story. Tony mentioned that when I was about nine my dear mother who I adored left us and went to live overseas. And it broke my father’s heart and it broke my heart too, as you would expect. My father loved me so much that he never said a bad word about my mother. He was filled with resentment and anger, as you would be, but he loved that little man, his son – me – so much and was so determined that I would love my mother and never think an ill thing about her, that he never criticised her; he talked her up, created in my mind the most perfect mother. When I was a young boy I thought I had the best mother in the world even though she was living in another country. He came close to brainwashing me but it was in a good service. And you know when he died, he was killed in 1982, very young, in an aeroplane accident. And my mother died in 1991, also too young. And when they died – I was an only child – I naturally got their correspondence. And when I read the letters that he had written, on aerograms as you can imagine in those days, no email, telephone calls were way too expensive – how could you do this? Why did you leave? What about Malcolm? All of those reproachful letters, and yet he’d put down that pen, seal up that aerogram and then he’d turn to his little boy and say ‘your mother loves you so much’. And he said that because of love. He conquered his natural resentment, his anger, with love. And I’ve had so much other love as well. The love of my darling wife Lucy, my children. But you know when you have been the beneficiary of such transcendent love as I have been, you realise that at the core of our faith and at the core truthfully of many faiths is that central mystery, that essential mystery of love. And that’s the work we seek to do and with your support and with your love we will do it better than ever before. Thank you very much. [ends] adminSun, 09 Nov 2008 04:44:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/180/Back-to-bloggingCentral-Coast-visit-media-opens-door-to-students-from-remote-australia.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=180http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=180&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/180/Back-to-bloggingCentral-Coast-visit-media-opens-door-to-students-from-remote-australia.aspxParliament has been "up" (ie adjourned) for two weeks now  days now and it has been good to get out into the community. Tomorrow its back to Canberra for another week of sittings.  Two weeks ago Lucy and I (without dogs) set off on the 25 km 7 bridges walk. This is a great thing to do and I wish I had done it before. You start in the city of sydney at the Rocks and walk around the waterfront of Millers Point, across into Pyrmont then through the inner west of Lilyfield, Rozelle and so forth out to Gladesville and then back around the northern side of the harbour through Lane Cover, North Sydney to cross the Harbour Bridge and complete the walk. Read more here Lucy and I found the first half of the walk especially interesting as it went through the redeveloped areas around Pyrmont, Walsh Bay, Ultimo - so much has happened there so recently it was good to see it and of course Lucy had been heavily involved in much of the planning decisions during her time on the City Council. The inner west suburbs of Lilyfield and Rozelle (especially the walk through the grounds of the Sydney College of the Arts - Callan Park) were also fascinating. This is the best way to see any city - on foot. Although the feet were not so sure towards the end of the walk as we were rewarded for our efforts by returning over the Harbour Bridge. Last weekend we were in the Central Coast having taken the train up to Gosford from Sydney on the previous Thursday. It is a spectacular ride along the edge of the Hawkesbury River - must be one of the most scenic train trips in the world - but as any local will tell you the train service is not regular, reliable, frequent or fast enough. The Central Coast has had many infrastructure challenges and I was pleased when we were in Government to provide support to their water infrastructure, in particular funding a pipeline from the Hunter water system to the Central Coast as well as funding a pipeline to link their two main storages. But transport remains a big issue.   The next day, Friday, we spent meeting lots of local residents and I was delighted to meet some old friends. At Erina Fair I met a lady who I had debated against while I was a school boy and I also met an older lady who had been a 3 year old refugee in the Greta migrant camp just after the War where she and her Ukrainian parents learned English. My paternal grandfather, Fred Turnbull, had been teaching at the Greta camp. A small world indeed.   I spoke at the Liberal Party's State Council the following day at Terrigal  and the speech is here.    Last Monday I met with some young indigenous students from remote Australia who have come down to Sydney for internships with media organisations. They were staying at Glenferrie Lodge in Kirribilli and that was where we had breakfast with them. This inititiative called A Foot in the Door”  was started in 2007 by Sam de Brito who is a journalist and blogger working at the Sydney Morning Herald. The young people were working at a range of media organisations including Sunrise, Sky News, Channel V, Fox Sports, Girlfriend, Dolly, Nickelodeon and Good News Week.   They all looked very keen and ready to take on the media world!  Well done Sam for getting this under way. Sam has blogged on this recently here.  Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:36:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:180http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/26/Election-of-President-of-the-United-States.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=26http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=26&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/26/Election-of-President-of-the-United-States.aspxOn behalf of the federal Opposition in Australia, I congratulate Senator Barack Obama on his historic election victory and look forward to working closely and productively with the new administration. Senator Obama’s victory is, as he often said during the campaign, a defining moment in history. The idea that an African-American could be President would have been unthinkable only a few decades ago. Consider this: one of the millions of Americans who voted for Senator Obama was herself the daughter of a slave. As President, Barack Obama, will have the opportunity to show the world the strength, resilience and above all the diversity of American democracy. Like Australia, Americans come from every culture, religion and race. Like Australia, America draws its strength from its tolerance, its openness and above all its freedom. Barack Obama’s victory is more than the realisation of Martin Luther King’s dream that one day his little children would be judged not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character. It is also the opportunity for a stronger America, with a new leader, to take up the call of Dr King to “let freedom ring” around the world. This mighty democracy now has a President who embodies the diversity that is modern America. He can speak to the world not just as an American but as a citizen of the world. Senator Obama’s is a story that transcends, palpably and very powerfully, the everyday discourse of political life. The United States remains Australia’s most important ally, both in its role as the world’s leading democracy and through its crucial contribution to security and stability in our own Asia-Pacific region. Barack Obama is an outstanding American, and a friend of Australia. I am confident he will strive to strengthen still further an alliance which has never been broader, deeper or closer than it is today.    More than ever, in these difficult and testing global conditions, the world will look to the next US president for leadership across a wide spectrum of issues – from stabilising the international financial system, to grappling with the challenges of climate change and energy security; from ensuring the world’s major economies remained committed to open markets and free trade, and to dealing resolutely with the threat to free societies from terrorists and extremists. I firmly believe Senator Obama will provide this leadership with distinction. Australia, too, has a significant role to play in these global debates and for our part we will work to further strengthen and advance the close working relationship between our two countries and in particular with the new President  adminThu, 06 Nov 2008 03:55:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:26http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/27/Rudd-dodging-questions-over-damaging-leak.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=27http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=27&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/27/Rudd-dodging-questions-over-damaging-leak.aspxPrime Minister Kevin Rudd risks further damage to Australia’s international standing by refusing to come clean with an explanation of how his private conversation with the US President leaked to the Australian media. Rather than answer directly important questions on how details of his October 10 phone hook-up to the White House came to be disseminated publicly, Mr Rudd has sought desperately to deflect public scrutiny by demanding of me an apology for comments made by former prime minister, John Howard, more than 18 months ago. For the record, I firmly believe that the next President of the United States, whether it is Senator Obama or Senator McCain, will be resolute and robust in dealing with the threat to free societies posed by terrorism. Plainly, Mr Rudd’s posturing today represents a brazen diversionary tactic. Rather than apologise for the inexcusable leak from his office of confidential exchanges with the US President – an episode which has seriously compromised Australia’s credibility and reputation not only in Washington, but across the international diplomatic community – the Prime Minister prefers to engage in irrelevant partisan game-playing. A week after the US Administration was forced to take the unprecedented step of denying explicitly the published account of the conversation between President Bush and Mr Rudd, the Prime Minister has still to offer an explanation of how, and why, this embarrassing media leak occurred. This is no way to conduct diplomacy with our most important ally. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike must be left to wonder whether the Australian Government can be trusted to honour the protocols and practices relating to private and confidential discussions between heads of government. It is incumbent on Mr Rudd to clear the air by ordering an official inquiry, ideally by the Australian Federal Police, in the hope of preventing similar breaches in future. For unless the Prime Minister is prepared to offer a full and frank explanation for this egregious breach of the accepted rules of diplomacy, the danger is he will no longer be taken into the confidence of other world leaders. Such an outcome would be extremely damaging to Australia’s interests.  adminWed, 05 Nov 2008 03:59:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:27http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/107/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-NSW-Division.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=107http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=107&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/107/Address-to-the-Liberal-Party-NSW-Division.aspx Source: Crowne Plaza, Terrigal E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………... Thank you very much Nick, President Campbell as I should address you, for that very warm introduction. It’s great to be here with so many Liberal Party colleagues. Let me acknowledge my federal parliamentary colleagues, Philip Ruddock and the rest of the federal parliamentary colleagues who are here. And of course Barry O’Farrell and our state parliamentary colleagues as well. Let me also pay congratulations to three outstanding Liberals who did so well in the recent by-elections. Victor Dominello, the new Member for Ryde. What a great win and what great encouragement it gives us at the federal level because the seat of Bennelong I can assure you my friends is one we are determined to bring back into the Liberal fold at the next election. And also let’s not forget the outstanding performances, enormous swings won by Dai Le in Cabramatta. And Michael Hawatt in Lakemba, another great result. Well done Michael. And finally before I move onto the federal scene let’s not forget that level of government which is closest to the people, really at the grass roots of our whole system of government in Australia and that’s local government. And the Liberal Party, its candidates, its organisation just did so well in those recent local government elections and I want to congratulate everybody. I’m not going to single anyone out... but I am the Member for Wentworth and I just want to say it is really great to have a Liberal mayor and deputy mayor in Waverley. You know we are facing enormous economic challenges in Australia as indeed the whole world is. And Nick was quite right when he said a moment ago that the Rudd Government has mishandled its response to the global credit crisis – and not just recently but from the beginning of the year – and the reason they have mishandled it my friends is because they always have a political strategy focused on media spin. Everything Kevin Rudd does is straight out of Bob Carr and Morris Iemma’s playbook. When Rudd came to Canberra it was like Morris Iemma’s media team moving into the Prime Minister’s office. Everything has been done for a quick headline, a quick bit of media spin. And if you go right back to the beginning of the year just consider this, let’s cast our minds back to the beginning of the year. Kevin Rudd inherited one of the strongest economies in the world. He inherited a government which had paid off all of its debt and was in fact a net lender. It had a positive balance in the bank. You’d struggle to find too many developed economies that could match that, I can assure you. And that was all done over 11 and a half years of Coalition government. You had strong budget surpluses, you had unemployment at record low levels, and you had high economic growth. And so Mr Rudd could have sat back and said gosh, I’ve won the lottery, how could I be so lucky as to get into government and have all of this at my fingertips? But no, instead he wanted to create an economic crime. He wanted to fabricate an economic crime and then pin it on John Howard. And so the inflation numbers at the end of last year were higher than we would like them to be. A lot lower than they are today I might add, a very substantial amount lower than they are today. But so they jumped on that and he and Wayne Swan went around the country saying inflation is out of control. In fact to be precise Wayne swan said the inflation genie is out of the bottle. And he said that just before the Reserve Bank met in February. He said that again and again, raised inflationary expectations and in effect egged the Reserve Bank on to put up interest rates. Now Kevin Rudd not satisfied with the genie being out of the bottle went further and he said there was an inflation monster running amok across the country wreaking havoc. That was how he described it. All of which put pressure on the Reserve Bank to put up rates. Now what did we say, for our part, in the Coalition? We noted that there was a sub-prime crisis, a credit crisis in the United States, brought about I might say not because of extreme capitalism or some new and exotic economic activity, but it had its origins in that time honoured mistake that lenders and banks often make, which is lending too much money to too many people who cannot afford to repay the loans. But that’s another story. But that crisis was looming at it was clearly going to have an impact on Australia and put downward pressure on economic growth around the world. So we said that the Reserve Bank should stay its hand and because of the pressure coming from overseas it should stay its hand and not move to put up rates because there was going to be more than enough economic slowing coming from the rest of the world. Well with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think anyone would argue that our judgement was not superior to that of Mr Rudd and Mr Swan. And remember this, changes in monetary policy, changes in interest rates have a long lead time. It takes time to feed into the system. Those rises in interest rates at the beginning of the year are starting to hit the economy now. So right at the time when we are looking for stimulus, as the Reserve Bank is pulling interest rates down, we are being impacted by the rises earlier in the year. So they got the economic crisis dead wrong at the beginning of the year, and why? Because they had a political strategy, they had no economic strategy. And then of course by September things started to get a lot worse. By the middle of September the economic crisis in the United States and in Europe was getting much worse indeed. The big investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed and there was a whole range of events which we’ve all read about in the press. And there was anxiety among many Australians about the economic future of the world and our country and so it was not unreasonable for them to have that anxiety. But we have in Australia a banking system which is well regulated. And who set up the regulatory system? John Howard, Peter Costello. They gave the Reserve Bank its independence; they set up APRA, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. The regulatory system that keeps our banks secure and ensures that they have not engaged in the imprudent lending that has been the cause of the problem in the United States – that is one of the legacies of the Howard years for Australia. Again you won’t hear anything of that from Mr Rudd. But Mr Rudd in his response to this crisis has chosen to go again for the grand gesture. You’ll recall that some weeks ago Julie Bishop and I made the offer to work collaboratively with Mr Rudd. We reached across the parliament as it were and said this is a crisis, we are happy to sit down and work with you and collaborate with you in this period of serious economic crisis. And Mr Rudd’s response was as usual one of complete contempt. He had no interest in doing that at all. So we’ve proceeded to make constructive and positive, sensible suggestions. And we suggested that the bank deposit guarantee should be increased from $20,000 to $100,000. Not because we felt the banks were lacking in security or that deposits weren’t safe. No one was seriously arguing that anywhere. What we wanted to do was to provide some additional security, almost from a psychological point of view, to make sure that people with deposits, particularly in smaller banks, did not feel that they were lacking in security and did not feel they had to move them to a larger institution. That was the aim. And that was a similar measure to that which has been imposed or established in many countries around the world. Around the world the bank deposit guarantees are of that order. 50,000 Euros in Europe, 50,000 pounds in the United Kingdom,. $100,000, recently increased in the United States. But Mr Rudd decided that that wasn’t good enough. Again he wanted the grand gesture, the big political hit. So he said, almost unique among the world, notwithstanding our banks and our financial system was regarded as the safest and most secure, he said I am going to go for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. An extraordinary intervention into the market. And what has been the result? He has made a serious financial crisis much worse. There are hundreds of thousands of Australians whose life savings in cash management trusts and mortgage funds have been frozen and they can’t get access to them. And Mr Swan, presented with the consequences of his own folly, says ‘line up at Centrelink.’ That’s the voice of compassion, isn’t it? This is a Labor Government that’s really, really in touch. And ever since then they have been scrambling to claw it back. They’ve reduced that cap down to $1 million. You saw Mr Rudd yesterday was pouring heaps of scorn on us and the Opposition generally for having said the cap should be at $100,000. And yet you see no less an authority than Gail Kelly, the woman who runs Westpac, and with the merger with St George likely to be Australia’s biggest bank along with the Commonwealth Bank. Gail Kelly has said the deposit guarantee should be $100,000, in other words high enough to give some reassurance but not so high as to distort the markets. We’ve seen the finance companies that the motor industry, in particular, rely on to finance people’s acquisition of vehicles, we’ve sent hem pulling out of the market because they can’t refinance their books thanks to this unlimited deposit guarantee. So Mr Rudd and Mr Swan’s approach has been exactly the same as state Labor. We just haven’t had them for quite so long. But we have seen what the New South Wales Labor Party does in government and now we’re seeing what their protégé is doing in government in Canberra. And it is a focus on spin, a focus on the media headline over substance. And you can go right through their efforts in this nearly one year they’ve been in office. Look at what they did with FuelWatch, what an absurdity. You know they promised that they would bring petrol prices down with their efforts and they have got a proposal which will only reduce competition. You’ve seen independents out there bringing prices down, taking on the big petrol companies – well their position is dramatically undermined if FuelWatch were to be introduced. And of course we’ve see probably the height of absurdity and I would encourage all of you to have a look at this because you will never find a better way to see $14 million of your taxes wasted than the extraordinary site Grocery Choice, which tells you what a theoretical basket of groceries might have cost on average in a vast geographical area a month ago. All of us have seen governments in good faith or not so good faith produce information for the benefit of the public. I challenge you to find, in fact I’d welcome it, if you can find one let us know. I challenge you to find a more useless piece of official information than the Grocery Choice website. But it is, I’m afraid to say, our taxes at work, or not at work as the case may be. So it’s been a case really with Mr Rudd of his political spin, his media focused approach failing to meet up, failing to come up to rise to the challenge of the economic crisis. And what do we have to offer, what is our alternative? Well we have a proven record of strong economic management, 11 and a half years of strong economic management. The reason we can say with confidence that while we are in a storm and will get wet but won’t sink, the reason we can say that and know that it’s true is because of the sound financial foundations that were established over 11 and a half years of Coalition government. And as we look to the future, as we look to the 2010 election I can tell you my friends we not only can win in 2010 but we must. We cannot allow Kevin Rudd to get a second term. Now we all felt the hurt of the last election and of course particularly here in the Central Coast where two outstanding federal members, Ken Ticehurst and Jim Lloyd were defeated. We will win these seats back. We will win these seats back. I spent yesterday here on the Central Coast and I can tell you, I didn’t find many people who voted Labor. And I got around, I can tell you there weren’t many Labor voters. I think a lot of people now are regretting the decision they took. But we as a party cannot let down the millions of Australians who want to have strong Liberal government. We have to put the best candidates into the field, we have to have the best resourced campaign, we have to have the best policies. Those of us in the parliamentary wing know that we are at the front of the phalanx. We’re at the front, but we cannot get there without your support. We might be at the point of the spear but we need your energy, your commitment behind us to carry us to victory. Because if we let Rudd get a second term this country will go backwards in the way New South Wales has. Nobody knows better the consequence of year after year of spin dominated, media cycle driven, empty, vacuous Labor government than the people of New South Wales. We must not let Kevin Rudd do to Australia what state Labor has done to New South Wales. That is our challenge. You know we have a three per cent swing and we will win government again. We felt it was an enormous loss, we did. But when you look at it, his majority is not nearly as big, not nearly as big as the one John Howard won in 1996. So it is very achievable but it will require focus, it will require unity, it will require outstanding candidates and outstanding local campaigns. We have to be very focused on the seats we need to win. The seats we need to hold too of course. We have to be very focused on that and recognise that we owe it to Australia to win in 2010. We have already seen the damage Mr Rudd’s style of government has done in less than a year of government. And I ask you this; Mr Rudd is so conceited he resents anybody questioning him. I’m sure many of you watch question time in the House of Representatives. And when we stand up and ask reasonable questions, seeking information, what do we get? Just a torrent of abuse and indignation. It’s as though he wants to say ‘how dare you, how dare you ask me, Kevin Rudd, a question? How dare you challenge my wisdom?’ And he holds himself out as being a great manager. He is a lifetime bureaucrat – and I have nothing ill to say of bureaucrats – but I tell you, he gives the public service a very bad name, he really does, he really does. In fact I think we were better off in the first part of the year when he was doing nothing. And I just leave you with this question to ponder because it’s one that I think most Australians find almost incredible, that Kevin Rudd on that weekend of the 11th and 12th of October made a momentous decision to have this universal unlimited bank deposit guarantee, which has had so many adverse consequences, some of which cannot be undone, at least in the short term. And others he is trying to undo as best he can. He made that decision and then told the world – and we believed him, we all trusted him – told us that he had made it in the closest possible consultation with the regulators, including the Reserve Bank of Australia. And then we learned that while he had time to bring in the television cameras, to take a picture of him with his sleeves down. And then someone said ‘no, you’ve got to have them up’, so they came back in, took another picture of him with the sleeves up. So he had all the time to do that, the cameramen came in and out, the journalists came in and out. He posed, he looked worried, he looked up, he looked down. He never picked up the phone and spoke to the governor of the Reserve Bank. Now can you imagine, would any of us, would any of us seriously contemplate making a decision like that without having the Reserve Bank in the room, the governor and his senior officers. Wouldn’t you have spent hours and hours going up hill and down dale, what about this, what about that? What are the arguments for, what are the arguments against? You know he claims, he says in parliament that the way he consulted the reserve Bank was simply to say to the Secretary of the Treasury, ‘are the regulators happy with this?’ To which apparently the Secretary of the Treasury said ‘yes.’ Well one of our former colleagues in the previous government who you all know and admire said to me, he said that would be like the Cabinet making a decision to go to war without speaking to any of the generals, and simply saying to the Secretary of the Defence Department, ‘is Angus Houston okay with that?’ Yes, alright off we go. I mean that is how slipshod and absurd it is. And this is the new leadership we’ve been apparently given. We cannot afford much more of this leadership. He has done enough damage already and no doubt he will do more. We owe it to Australia to deliver Liberal government in 2010 and I know that with your support we will. Thank you very much.adminSun, 02 Nov 2008 04:46:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:107http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/106/Address-to-Liberal-Party-NSW-State-Council-Terrigal.aspx#Comments0http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=105&ModuleID=403&ArticleID=106http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=106&PortalID=0&TabID=105http://archive.malcolmturnbull.com.au/MalcolmsBlogs/tabid/105/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/106/Address-to-Liberal-Party-NSW-State-Council-Terrigal.aspx TRANSCRIPT OF THE HON. MALCOLM TURNBULL MP ADDRESS TO THE LIBERAL PARTY (NSW) STATE COUNCIL TERRIGAL E&OE…………………………………………………………………… Thank you very much Nick, President Campbell as I should address you, for that very warm introduction. It’s great to be here with so many Liberal Party colleagues. Let me acknowledge my federal parliamentary colleagues, Philip Ruddock and the rest of the federal parliamentary colleagues who are here. And of course Barry O’Farrell and our state parliamentary colleagues as well. Let me also pay congratulations to three outstanding Liberals who did so well in the recent by-elections. Victor Dominello the new Member for Ryde. What a great win and what great encouragement it gives us at the federal level because the seat of Bennelong I can assure you my friends is one we are determined to bring back into the Liberal fold at the next election. And also let’s not forget the outstanding performances, enormous swings won by Dai Lee in Cabramatta.  And Michael Hawatt in Lakemba, another great result. Well done Michael. And finally before I move onto the federal scene let’s not forget that level of government which is closest to the people, really at the grass roots of our whole system of government in Australia and that’s local government. And the Liberal Party, its candidates, its organisation just did so well in those recent local government elections and I want to congratulate everybody. I’m not going to single anyone out......but I am the Member for Wentworth and I just want to say it is really great to have a Liberal mayor and deputy mayor in Waverley. You know we are facing enormous economic challenges in Australia as indeed the whole world is. And Nick was quite right when he said a moment ago that the Rudd Government has mishandled its response to the global credit crisis. And not just recently but from the beginning of the year. And the reason they have mishandled it my friends is because they always have a political strategy focused on media spin. Everything Kevin Rudd does is straight out of Bob Carr and Morris Iemma’s playbook. When Rudd came to Canberra it was like Morris Iemma’s media team moving into the Prime Minister’s office. Everything has been done for a quick headline, a quick bit of media spin. And if you go right back to the beginning of the year just consider this, let’s cast our minds back to the beginning of the year. Kevin Rudd inherited one of the strongest economies in the world. He inherited a government which had paid off all of its debt and was in fact a net lender. It had a positive balance in the bank. You’d struggle to find too many developed economies that could match that, I can assure you. That was all done over 11 and a half years of Coalition government. You had strong budget surpluses, you had unemployment at record low levels, and you had high economic growth. And so Mr Rudd could have sat back and said gosh, I’ve won the lottery, how could I be so lucky as to get into government and have all of this at my fingertips? But no, instead he wanted to create an economic crime, he wanted to fabricate an economic crime and then pin it on John Howard. And so the inflation numbers at the end of last year were higher than we would like them to be. A lot lower than they are today I might add, a very substantial amount lower than they are today. But so they jumped on that and he and Wayne Swan went around the country saying inflation is out of control. In fact to be precise Wayne swan said the inflation genie is out of the bottle. And he said that just before the Reserve Bank met in February. He said that again and again, raised inflationary expectations and in effect egged the reserve Bank on to put up interest rates. Now Kevin Rudd not satisfied with the genie being out of the bottle went further and he said there was an inflation monster running amok across the country wreaking havoc. That was how he described it. All of which put pressure on the Reserve Bank to put up rates. Now what did we say, for our part, in the Coalition? We noted that there was a sub-prime crisis, a credit crisis in the United States, brought about I might say not because of extreme capitalism or some new and exotic economic activity, but it had its origins in that time honoured mistake that lenders and banks often make which is lending too much money to too many people who cannot afford to repay the loans. But that’s another story. But that crisis was looming at it was clearly going to have an impact on Australia and put downward pressure on economic growth around the world. So we said that the Reserve Bank should stay its hand. And because of the pressure coming from overseas it should stay its hand and not move to put up rates because there was going to be more than enough economic slowing coming from the rest of the world. Well with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think anyone would argue that our judgement was not superior to that of Mr Rudd and Mr Swan. And remember this, changes in monetary policy, changes in interest rates have a long lead time. If you change interest rates tomorrow it doesn’t have an effect today. It takes time to feed into the system. Those rises in interest rates at the beginning of the year are starting to hit the economy now. So right at the time when we are looking for stimulus, as the Reserve Bank is pulling interest rates down, we are being impacted by the rises earlier in the year. So they got the economic crisis dead wrong at the beginning of the year, and why? Because they had a political strategy, they had no economic strategy. And then of course by September things started to get a lot worse. By the middle of September the economic crisis in the United States and in Europe was getting much worse indeed. The big investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed and there was a whole range of events which we’ve all read about in the press. And there was anxiety among many Australians about the economic future of the world and our country and so it was not unreasonable for them to have that anxiety. But we have in Australia a banking system which is well regulated, and who set up the regulatory system? John Howard, Peter Costello, they gave the Reserve Bank its independence, they set up APRA, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority. The regulatory system that keeps our banks secure and ensures that they have not engaged in the imprudent lending that has been the cause of the problem in the United States, that is one of the legacies of the Howard years for Australia. Again you won’t hear anything of that from Mr Rudd. But Mr Rudd in his response to this crisis has chosen to go again for the grand gesture. You’ll recall that some weeks ago Julie Bishop and I made the offer to work collaboratively with Mr Rudd. We reached across the parliament as it were and said this is a crisis, we are happy to sit down and work with you and collaborate with you in this period of serious economic crisis. And Mr Rudd’s response was as usual one of complete contempt. He had no interest in doing that at all. So we proceeded to make constructive and positive, sensible suggestions. And we suggested that the bank deposit guarantee should be increased from $20,000 to $100,000. Not because we felt the banks were lacking in security or that deposits weren’t safe. No one was seriously arguing that anywhere. What we wanted to do was to provide some additional security, almost from a psychological point of view, to make sure that people with deposits, particularly in smaller banks, did not feel that they were lacking in security and did not feel they had to move them to a larger institution. That was the aim. And that was a similar measure to that which has been imposed or established in many countries around the world. Around the world the bank deposit guarantees are of that order. 50,000 Euros in Europe, 50,000 pounds in the United Kingdom. $100,000, recently increased in the United States. But Mr Rudd decided that that wasn’t good enough. Again he wanted the grand gesture, the big political hit. So he said almost unique among the world, notwithstanding our banks and our financial system was regarded as the safest and most secure, he said I am going to go for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. An extraordinary intervention into the market. And what has been the result? He has made a serious financial crisis much worse. There are hundreds of thousands of Australians whose life savings in cash management trusts and mortgage funds have been frozen and they can’t get access to them. And Mr Swan, presented with the consequences of his own folly, says ‘line up at Centrelink.’ That’s the voice of compassion isn’t it? This is a Labor Government that’s really, really in touch. And ever since then they have been scrambling to claw it back. They’ve reduced that cap down to $1 million. You saw Mr Rudd yesterday was pouring heaps of scorn on us and the opposition generally for having said the cap should be at $100,000. And yet you see no less an authority than Gail Kelly, the woman who runs Westpac and with the merger with St George likely to be Australia’s biggest bank, along with the Commonwealth Bank. Gail Kelly has said the deposit guarantee should be $100,000, in other words, high enough to give some reassurance but not so high as to distort the markets. We’ve seen the finance companies that the motor industry, in particular, rely on to finance people’s acquisition of vehicles, we’ve sent hem pulling out of the market because they can’t refinance their books thank to this unlimited deposit guarantee. So Mr Rudd and Mr Swan’s approach has been exactly the same as state Labor. We just haven’t had them for quite so long. But we have seen what the New South Wales Labor Party does in government and now we’re seeing what their protégé is doing in government in Canberra. And it is a focus on spin, a focus on the media headline over substance. And you can go right through their efforts in this nearly one year they’ve been in office. Look at what they did with Fuel Watch, what an absurdity. You know they promised that they would bring petrol prices down with their efforts and they have got a proposal which will only reduce competition. You’ve seen independents out there bringing prices down, taking on the big petrol companies, well their position is dramatically undermined if Fuel Watch were to be introduced. And of course we’ve see probably the height of absurdity and I would encourage all of you to have a look at this because you will never find a better way to see $14 million of your taxes wasted than the extraordinary site, Grocery Choice, which tells you what a theoretical basket of groceries might have cost on average in a vast geographical area a month ago. All of us have seen governments in good faith or not so good faith produce information for the benefit of the public. I challenge you to find, in fact I’d welcome it, if you can find one let us know. I challenge you to find a more useless piece of official information than the Grocery Choice website. But it is I’m afraid to say our taxes at work, or not at work as the case may be. So it’s been a case really with Mr Rudd of his political spin, his media focused approach failing to meet up, failing to come up, to rise to the challenge of the economic crisis. And what do we have to offer, what is our alternative? Well we have a proven record of strong economic management, 11 and a half years of strong economic management. The reason we can say with confidence that while we are in a storm and will get wet but won’t sink, the reason we can say that and know that it’s true is because of the sound financial foundations that were established over 11 and a half years of Coalition government. And as we look to the future, as we look to the 2010m election I can tell you my friends we not only can win in 2010 but we must. We cannot allow Kevin Rudd to get a second term. Now we all felt the hurt of the last election and of course particularly here in the Central Coast where two outstanding federal members, Ken Ticehurst and Jim Lloyd were defeated. We will win these seats back, we will win these seats back. I spent yesterday here on the Central Coast and I can tell you, I didn’t find many people who voted Labor. And I got around, I got around, I can tell you there weren’t many Labor voters. I think a lot of people now are regretting the decision they took. But we as a party cannot let down the millions of Australians who want to have strong Liberal government. We have to put the best candidates into the field, we have to have the best resourced campaign, we have to have the best policies. Those of us in the parliamentary wing know that we are at the front of the phalanx. We’re at the front, but we cannot get there without your support. We might be at the point of the spear but we need your energy, your commitment behind us to carry us to victory. Because if we let Rudd get a second term this country will go backwards in the way New South Wales has. Nobody knows better the consequence of year after year of spin dominated, media cycle driven, empty, vacuous Labor government than the people of New South Wales. We must not let Kevin Rudd do to Australia what state Labor has done to new South Wales. That is our challenge. You know we have a three per cent swing and we will win government again. Kevin Rudd had…we felt it was an enormous loss, we did. But when you look at it, his majority is not nearly as big, not nearly as big as the one John Howard won in 1996. So it is very achievable but it will require focus, it will require unity, it will require outstanding candidates and outstanding local campaigns. Wee have to be very focused on the seats we need to win,. The seats we need to hold too of course. We have to be very focused on that and recognise that we owe it to Australia to win in 2010. We have already seen the damage Mr Rudd’s style of government has done in less than a year of government. And I ask you this; Mr Rudd is so conceited he resents anybody questioning him. I’m sure many of you watch question time in the House of Representatives. And when we stand up and ask reasonable questions, seeking information what do we get? Just a torrent of abuse and indignation. It’s as though he wants to say ‘how dare you, how dare you ask me, Kevin Rudd, a question? How dare you challenge my wisdom?’ And he holds himself out as being a great manager. He is a lifetime bureaucrat and I have nothing ill to say of bureaucrats. But I tell you, he gives the public service a very bad name, he really does, he really does. In fact I think we were better off in the first part of the year when he was doing nothing. And I just leave you with this question to ponder because it’s one that I think most Australians find almost incredible, that Kevin Rudd on that weekend of the 11th and 12th of October made a momentous decision to have this universal unlimited bank deposit guarantee, which has had so many adverse consequences, some of which cannot be undone, at least in the short term. And others he is trying to undo as best he can. He made that decision and then told the world – and we believed him, we all trusted him – told us that he had made it in the closest possible consultation with the regulators, including the Reserve Bank of Australia. And then we learned that while he had time to bring in the television cameras, to take a picture of him with his sleeves down. And then someone said no, you’ve got to have them up, so they came back in, took another picture of him with the sleeves up. So he had all the time to do that, the cameramen came in and out, the journalists came in and out. He posed, he looked worried, he looked up, he looked down. He never picked up the phone and spoke to the governor of the Reserve Bank. Now can you imagine, would any of us, would any of us seriously contemplate making a decision like that without having the Reserve Bank in the room, the governor and his senior officers. Wouldn’t you have spent hours and hours going up hill and down dale, what about this, what about that? What are the arguments for, what are the arguments against? You know he claims, he says in parliament that the way he consulted the reserve Bank was simply to say to the Secretary of the Treasury, ‘are the regulators happy with this?’ To which apparently the Secretary of the treasury said ‘yes.’ Well one of our former colleagues in the previous government who you all know and admire said to me, he said that would be like the Cabinet making a decision to go to war without speaking to any of the generals, and simply saying to the Secretary of the Defence Department, ‘is Angus Houston okay with that?’ Yes, alright off we go. I mean that is how slipshod and absurd it is. And this is the new leadership we’ve been apparently given. We cannot afford much more of this leadership. He has done enough damage already and no doubt he will do more. We owe it to Australia to deliver Liberal government in 2010 and I know that with your support we will. Thank you very much. adminSun, 02 Nov 2008 04:45:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:106