Mr HAWKER (10:55 AM) —I have been provoked by the member for Wills. I really think that it is very easy to say that it is a question of politics and to have a bit of 20/20 hindsight. I would suggest that if you want to go down that path then we could find a little bit more 20/20 hindsight. One of the problems that APRA has found, and I have no doubt that the royal commission will have something to say about this as well, is that when it comes to regulating insurance—and we want to talk about the HIH problem—APRA has been operating under some very old legislation. I am sure the member for Wills would be aware of this, but he might not like to admit it.

The fact is that the legislation probably is more than 25 years old and we have seen the situation where both the Hawke and Keating governments had many opportunities to amend that legislation, to modernise it and to assist the regulators, both the ISC and now APRA, to have the opportunity to better regulate insurance. Had it been amended, it is possible that the HIH problem could have been dealt with much earlier and maybe with less pain not only to the shareholders and maybe the policyholders but to taxpayers as well. So when we talk about accountability maybe we had better just chuck in something about the accountability of the Australian Labor Party on this too, because they had all those years of the Hawke and Keating governments and they did nothing. Before you come in here washing your hands of the matter and saying, `Well, we have got to tell the government what to do,' you had better have a look at your own record.