Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You know what you have been doing in regard to single desk. You know what you have been doing in all the trouble that Vaile has been confronting. Do you think we do not know? You know exactly what we are talking about. Let me get to the position of the member for Blair, because this is most interesting. This gets to the nub of what has happened in Queensland in recent times. This gets to the obsession of the Liberal Party and the National Party with their own affairs—who gets the white cars, who is on top and who gets to share the spoils. It does not matter a darn what is happening to ordinary people. This is what the member for Blair said when he was asked a question—and he was not going to retreat, despite the Prime Minister’s intervention at the time:

When the person who moves the motion on the Liberal side is the Prime Minister’s representative on the state executive, and when the president of the party is appointed with the Prime Minister’s imprimatur, I think people who are sitting around that table are entitled to expect that those moves have been done with his full knowledge and concurrence.

That is not all the member for Blair had to say. It is quite a lot, but it is not all that he had to say. He continued:

But the people who have to have answer to that—

this refers to the fact that the whole show collapsed—

were the people who were aware of it earlier. Like, they weren’t just aware of it on Sunday like a lot of us were. They were aware of it on Friday. They were aware of it the week before. They were in a position to be able to plan for it and facilitate it effectively or stop it if it wasn’t going to work.

Journalist: Are you disappointed in the way the Prime Minister has handled his position on this?

Cameron Thompson: You know, I mean, I think there is answers to be had all round.

Indeed there are. For two weeks, the Prime Minister had that information before him. For two weeks, the Prime Minister understood that the Liberal Party and National Party were to amalgamate in Queensland. For two weeks, others of course had an understanding of it—and these were the sorts of things they said. Bruce Scott said, ‘Queenslanders wanted a single alternative to Labor that would get the priorities right for all Queensland.’ De-Anne Kelly said:

In terms of the state, we need to forge a closer relationship between the two parties to provide an alternative to the Beattie government.

Warren Entsch said, ‘The sooner they can get together, the better it will be.’

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