Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

For the members of this government to suggest that somehow they are mortally offended by the suggestion that they peddle dirt—how does anyone explain that? Whose office was it? Do we have an answer to that? Whose office was it, Prime Minister? You are so concerned about the reputation of your government, are you going to make inquiries about that? Are you going to make sure you find out the truth about that? That is all right, is it? Your little moral outrage only goes so far and under the moral outrage on the surface there is all of this unseemly conduct going on underneath that you avert your eyes from but you know is occurring—you must know is occurring. So do not come into this parliament with a holier-than-thou attitude when, beneath this modicum of moral outrage on the surface, underneath we have the trawling, the dirt and the carry-on.

We come to question time in this parliament and we ask questions for the purpose of getting answers. What do we routinely see from ministers in this government? We see evasion and we see personal attacks. Indeed, the only thing some government ministers do in this place during question time is make personal attacks—the only thing they do. When they are asked questions by their own backbench about government policy, they are lucky if there are two or three words about government policy and the rest of it is personal attack. This is the ordinary stock-in-trade of this government when it comes to the prosecution of its politics, and we know that this is just the start and that there are weeks and weeks of this to come in the future. It has been talked about. It has been rumoured.

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