Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say, from the behaviour of those opposite, that they actually just do not get it. This is a debate about standing orders and about lifting standards in the parliament, and what we have from the opposition is behaviour that is in breach of the standing orders, as they breached the standing orders day after day in the previous parliament. The previous Leader of the House never once got up and referred to a standing order or to the House of Representatives Practiceit was just about who had the numbers.

Let’s not have any nonsense about there being no consultation about these issues. The fact is that the government announced this initiative way back in December. There was no opposition from those opposite in December and no opposition from those opposite in January. It took them until this week, because we have an opposition bereft of ideas with nothing to say about the real issues confronting the nation—nothing to say about the education revolution, nothing to say about infrastructure, nothing to say about the debacles in defence and nothing to say about climate change and the water crisis.

The big issue on which they are going to take a stance on this first day of the new parliament is standing orders. What they have done is get a speaking list and tell every member who is not a new member that they have to be on the speaking list. So there are 40-odd members of parliament down to speak on this resolution tonight—hour after hour of speeches. What the opposition want, of course, is for us to gag the resolution before the House. I have indicated to the Leader of the Opposition and the Manager of Opposition Business that we will not be doing that. If they think that this is worthy of hour after hour of debate then that is fine. Let the Australian public know that that is their vision for the nation, their idea of the No. 1 priority facing this parliament. The fact is that they have nothing positive to say about the real issues facing the nation.

I was surprised that there was opposition to this proposal, because private members’ business is seen historically as being to the great advantage of the opposition. It is actually a time when you can have motions moved in the parliament. It is a time when you can have, during the grievance debate, ideas raised. Some ideas from your backbench might actually be good; they might actually feed into the debate that is going on within the coalition about what you stand for. That might not be a bad thing, to actually encourage a bit of debate, because it is quite clear that you cannot have it both ways. You cannot, on the one hand, say that the Labor Party has opened up debate for the opposition to take advantage of it, as was written in the Laura Tingle article in the Australian Financial Review two weeks ago, and yet come in here and say that this situation, in which we have in effect exactly the same rules as applied for private members’ business on Monday and exactly the same rules as applied in the Main Committee, is an atrocity.

The fact is that you have to look at what the opposition did when they were in government to see how fair dinkum they are. Let us look at their credibility when it comes to Matters of Public Importance. The previous government unilaterally cancelled eight MPIs in the last parliament alone. Over the 12 years of the Howard government there were 56 days when MPIs were proposed by the opposition but cancelled by the government. Indeed, on the last day of parliament, the dying hours of the Howard government, the government threw out the MPI entitled ‘The need for fresh thinking and new leadership to secure Australia’s future prosperity’. The opposition, the then government, might have thrown out our MPI, but the people of Australia threw them out because they understood that there was a need for fresh thinking and new leadership. The Australian people had other ideas.

Even the Main Committee was not immune from the Howard government’s contempt for parliament. There were at least six days in the last parliament when the Main Committee did not even sit. Why did they not sit when they were scheduled to? Because they had nothing to do.

See this speech in context