John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition asked me a long question which included an inaccurate claim that I had altered Hansard. If he is referring to the fact that, through a slip of the tongue, I said ‘Labor’ rather than ‘Liberal’, I can assure him the correction was not made at my request or instigation. It was made automatically by the Hansard staff. I want to say to the Leader of the Opposition that he has wasted 10 minutes of question time making a phoney allegation like that. It is of a piece with the absurd, over-the-top claim he made that in some way the government is behaving in an evil fashion in order to have the committee system that operated for 12 of the 13 years that the Labor Party was in office. Because we are bringing that back, we are somehow or other overturning parliamentary democracy. This is a bit rich coming from a man who served as Deputy Prime Minister to Lord Keating when he was Prime Minister, who basically looked across the dispatch box, looked at the serfs on the other side and said, ‘Question time is a privilege extended by the executive to the parliament.’

If the Leader of the Opposition has forgotten, let me remind him that in a very interesting interview back in 1994—

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