Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I would give the Leader of the House some advice. He took the liberty of trying to psychoanalyse the Leader of the Opposition. I would say to the Leader of the House: if he wants to go into the business of psychoanalysis, he should start a lot closer to home than that. He might want to apply some of that ability in psychoanalysis to himself before he tries to apply it to anybody else. You could see—as the man stood at the dispatch box—through the man to the small boy who in school would have engaged in some act of naughtiness, some act of misbehaviour, and when called to account by the nuns would have gone with the defence, ‘But I’m not the worst boy in the world.’ That was the quality of the defence of the Howard government that he gave at the dispatch box today. ‘We’re not the worst government in the world,’ was about as high as the defence got. This government should be judged against the standards that it has set for itself. We do not ask for anything more or less than for this government to be judged by the standards it set for itself.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I did something unusual today: I got the Federal Platform of the Liberal Party of Australia off its website. That is not something that I ordinarily do, but it is a very interesting document. Of the 22 pages of the document, five are blank and then there are two title pages. So, if you take those out, basically a third of the document is blank. But in the bits of the document that actually have some writing on them the government says, in its own Liberal Party platform:

The Commonwealth Parliament has an important role as a balance to the Executive, and the Senate should operate as a House of Review without obstructing the will of the elected Government.

It talks about safeguarding the public interest and says:

To safeguard these goals, Liberals support governments open to public scrutiny and with effective mechanisms of accountability.

That is in the Liberal Party Platform. The Prime Minister has also had cause to pontificate on these questions. On 2 April 2005, in respect of the government winning a majority in the Senate, the Prime Minister said:

And I make the simple promise to all of you that we will not let you down. We will not squander the mandate. We will not dishonour the loyal support that Liberals have given to this Government over the last nine years by wasting the opportunity of control of the Senate. But I make another promise to you—that we won’t use that authority in a reckless and arrogant fashion.

How has the government gone, against these lofty standards? We know that, against these lofty standards, the government’s track record is one of failure. In this House—and you, Mr Deputy Speaker, would be well aware of this—we have seen the rights of members to speak on bills just thrown out of the window, with 15 gags on bills moved in the last sitting fortnight. And we had the amazing spectacle of a government that had come in and moved a gag motion on a bill having to lift the gag motion because it could not get agreement in its own party room. It was going to guillotine itself, and then it had to get the blade off its neck because it was about to chop its head off and it did not even have a bill ready to go. But we have seen the rights of members of this parliament trashed by this government. It does not want members to be able to speak to bills that come before the House.

I turn to question time under this government—one of the key accountability mechanisms of this parliament, a mechanism to hold executive government in control. We all know that question time has degenerated into being questions without answers and answers without content. In terms of questions without answers, we now have a stage where government ministers get up and, if they are anywhere near the subject matter of the question asked by the opposition, that is deemed to be good enough. Under the current regime—and this is a hypothetical example—if I got to this dispatch box and asked the Minister for Transport and Regional Services: ‘Did you take a million-dollar bribe from a shipping company?’ it would be ruled as a relevant answer if the minister talked about shipping. That is where we have got to with standards in this place in terms of getting answers to questions that have been asked.

And then, when the government asks itself questions, what we get is answers without content, because the questions are largely a thinly disguised attempt to be able to bash the opposition. In this budget sitting of parliament since we came back from the Easter break, there have been 32 questions from government backbench members which were really all about bashing the opposition and there were three occasions on which government ministers were allowed to bash the opposition even though the question had not asked them to. So we have got to the absurd situation where we have questions from this side that never get an answer and we get questions from that side that are not about anything the government is doing—they are just about bashing the opposition. And it is no wonder that when standards are like that one of the few things that members of the opposition can do is interject. We are not alone in that; every day the government sends a barrage the other way. But, when we look across the House this year and ask what has happened, we see that 24 members of the opposition have been ejected from the House for interjecting and only one government member has been ejected from the House. I do not think that on any standard that could be seen to be fair.

On top of all that, we have a government that is now closing down Senate committees—one of the few remaining avenues of accountability in this place. I ask members to consider for themselves whether we would ever have got to the bottom of the ‘children overboard’ incident—we did not get all the way to the bottom but would we ever have got as far as we did—if it had not been for the Senate inquiry. The Senate inquiry is very important as an accountability mechanism. It is also very important as a public policy mechanism and, even though the government treats many of the outcomes of the public policy inquiries of the Senate with contempt, they are still important to the public debate. It was still worth while for Senator Peter Cook to have his cancer inquiry whilst he was dying of cancer, even if the current Minister for Health and Ageing does not have the simple courtesy, the simple competence, to respond to it. It was worth the Senate committee looking into petrol sniffing in Indigenous communities even if this minister for health is out pontificating about what Indigenous communities should do but not responding to the recommendations of that bipartisan committee. But it is that kind of work that this government now wants to shut down.

When it comes to standards, we all know you lead from the top and the Leader of the House is not a man who knows how to lead standards from the top. Mr Deputy Speaker, in deference to you, I would not want to take you through the ‘snivelling grub’ incident, but you know the one to which I refer. This is also the same Leader of the House who, in answer to a question on illicit drugs, said:

This is typical of the Leader of the Opposition. He surrendered to the Islamists over Iraq ...

That is as much an insult to the peaceful Islamic community of this nation as it is an insult to the Leader of the Opposition. That was an extraordinary remark to make in this place, and it is not apologised for to this day. We remember that the Leader of the House was the only minister to have been ejected from this place in 39 years on the day that he lost control and started marching over to the opposition benches with a view to having a physical confrontation with the then member for Braddon.

These are the standards of this government. The arrogant face that is shown by this government in this House is shown to the community. It is shown when it breaks its word over the Medicare safety net. It is shown through the extreme industrial relations legislation. It is shown when the government says, ‘We just don’t care what the Australian people think.’ I would like to end by echoing the words of the Prime Minister and asking him whether his government has acquitted this standard. The Prime Minister said about the Australian people:

They don’t like arrogant governments, they don’t like governments that take their support for granted but I am very conscious that in the past when governments of my persuasion have had the capacity to do so, they have sometimes disappointed their supporters in their failure to implement the programs that they took to the Australian public.

This is a government that by the Prime Minister’s own standards is acting with arrogance and contempt. (Time expired)

See this speech in context