Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Health and Ageing concluded his remarks by saying that the government over the last few days had been displaying ‘exemplary candour and honesty’ and the public would be able to vote knowing what they would get—more of the same. We will get more of the same, but what is that saying? It is not a fantasy of the Labor opposition. Jennifer Hewett in the Australian today gave us more of the same. She described what occurred in the House yesterday.

Howard sat down and Costello then stared straight ahead, stern-faced. No comments passed between them. There was no need. Their mutual passionate hatred and Costello’s obvious and outraged sense of betrayal echo far more loudly than any words either man uttered in public yesterday.

Yesterday I also spoke on the MPI and I made a maritime analogy to the great story of Moby Dick and the captain with his fiery eyes ablaze chasing the mad illusion that had sustained him for so long. Nautical allusions abound, because today we have a headline describing, instead of a noble captain going down with the ship, a tarnished Prime Minister jumping ship. This Prime Minister is quite content to leave his crew chained to the rails on the rotting hulk going down in the becalmed seas in which the government is now stranded.

The reality is that the Prime Minister does not trust his cabinet, and cabinet does not trust the Prime Minister. You know what? They are both absolutely right. For once I can agree with both the Prime Minister and the cabinet. They are each equally untrustworthy. This government have now gone beyond the analogy to Weekend at Bernie’s, with the Liberal Party carting around the corpse of the Prime Minister with sunglasses on pretending there is still political life in the body, to more or less an episode of Monty Python, with the public watching the government striving to pretend that the parrot is not dead but that it is really alive. In fact, they actually want you to vote for the parrot. This is an extraordinary situation. The Prime Minister put forward his own obituary and death notice last night on the 7.30 Report, but he still wants the public to vote for him, to vote for the political corpse.

We have the extraordinary situation where the Prime Minister sent out his emissary, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, to seek the views of his cabinet, got those views and then said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but cabinet has been overruled by Janette.’ That is an extraordinary situation. Terry McCrann, not the Labor Party, said:

Janette’s ruling the roost—and that’s untenable.

What was really to be expected? With apologies to Kim Beazley, who used the analogy last evening, it is a bit like Stalin sending out Molotov to ask the opinion of the commissars about how he is going. The Liberal frontbench have not realised what happens in that circumstance if you give an honest answer. In their case, they have simply been ignored and trampled over as irrelevant to the decision-making process, but in Stalin’s time you were shot. The real answer that John Howard needed to come back was, ‘We are doing excellently well. We are nearly 20 per cent behind in the polls and the public thinks that our Work Choices legislation is a crock, but, Prime Minister, you are doing exceedingly well.’ That was the answer that was needed and, when it was not given, the Prime Minister supplied it for himself. He put the medals on himself. Listen to his performance in question time today. The question from the member for Cowper was addressed to ‘the greatest ever Australian Treasurer’, and the response was to ‘the greatest ever member for Cowper’. The member for Moncrieff was talking about the ‘miracle economy of the world’. They are all pinning—(Time expired)

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