Mr KELVIN THOMSON (10:52 AM) —by leave—I move:

I could not help but notice that in the contributions of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance and Administration and the members for Petrie and Wannon they suggested we should not play politics with the issue of the HIH collapse. What an extraordinary view of politics and the role of politicians. You can imagine if a Labor government were in office and we had the largest corporate collapse in Australian history— $4 billion and a $640 million taxpayer funded bailout over the course of the next 10 years—the nature of parliamentary debate surrounding that. We would not get any of this `don't mention the war' stuff that we just had. As for the idea that all these matters ought to be left to the royal commission, the royal commission is a device to enhance accountability; it is not a device to avoid accountability. Those members ought to understand that fact. They ought to understand that that is exactly what the parliament is here for: to raise these issues and to make sure that there is public debate around matters of public concern. There are few matters of greater public concern this year than the collapse of HIH. The fact that a royal commission needs to be set up—the fact that you had to be dragged kicking and screaming to set up a royal commission—shows a lack of public confidence in the existing accountability arrangements concerning these matters. We have quite an audience here. I welcome them.

Mr Slipper —They are not here to be welcomed.

Mr KELVIN THOMSON —I understand why they are here, Parliamentary Secretary. They are in fact minders. The number of minders indicates the need to make sure that the parliamentary secretary does not slip up. This is the largest number of minders I have seen in my time here in the Main Committee, and that is a comment on the parliamentary secretary's capacity.

The member for Mitchell had some interesting things to say about my proposed amendments when I discussed them in general debate. I thought that a number of the comments made by the member for Mitchell concerning APRA were comments that I would agree with, and I thought he had some interesting things to say in that regard. However, I am pleased to say that, given that he expressed some reservations about my amendments, the government has, in fact, found my arguments more convincing than those of the member for Mitchell and, as I understand it, proposes to support the amendments that I have put forward. Given that and given that I outlined the case for my amendments in the general debate, I do not want to say anything further about that or to delay the committee any further in relation to these matters, but simply indicate that it is our position that these amendments should be supported.