Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

May we look back on this first day of the 42nd Parliament and ask, ‘How did a new government get so arrogant so quickly?’ On day one it has launched, as its first piece of government business, an attack on parliamentary democracy. The opposition is strongly committed to the integrity of the parliament and we support its functions and its primacy in our democracy. We believe in accountability and transparency, but that is not what this government motion is all about. There is a very apt description of this government motion. It is a stunt designed by the Prime Minister to generate a media headline and to give a false impression of activity and accountability. At first blush the public would believe that the proposal to sit on Fridays was the act of a new government putting its stamp on the parliament. However, the attendant publicity generated by the Prime Minister was that members would at last be working a five-day week, for the first time since Federation—a cheap shot at all parliamentarians as if this is the first time any of us have ever worked a five-day week. This was a slur not just on the Liberals and the Nationals but also on the Labor members and the Independents. The inference that underpinned the Prime Minister’s slur on the reputations of all of us is that we all travel home on Thursday nights and then we have a long weekend every weekend. That is borne out by the reaction, the feedback, to the publicity that the Prime Minister generated through various news sites with members of the public deriding what they had been told was a four-day sitting schedule before we slacked off.

The Prime Minister knows full well that we go back to our electorates on Thursday nights to deal with the demands of and assist our constituents. In fact, most of us on both sides of the House have a full day of constituent meetings on Fridays. The Prime Minister obviously thought that his colleagues were a soft target. Because the public love nothing better than a bit of pollie bashing, he deliberately set out to perpetuate the myth that parliamentarians on both sides of the House are lazy and have never done a decent week’s work. We are left to conclude that either the Prime Minister set out to mislead the Australian public or he is judging others by his own standards. If the Prime Minister has taken all his Fridays off, that is a matter for him. But he would know very well that the vast majority of this parliament, of his colleagues on both sides of the House, work very hard for six or seven days a week and rarely get a full day off once a week. But the last thing that any parliamentarian needs is for the Prime Minister of this country to cast aspersions on his hardworking and dedicated colleagues.

There are many misconceptions about parliamentarians and the nature of our work, and the last thing we need is for the Prime Minister to reinforce those misconceptions and the cynicism there is about those who occupy public office. However, this exercise has been illuminating. It has provided us with an insight into the modus operandi of the Rudd government. Mark Latham, in his infamous diary, said that this Prime Minister is ‘addicted to the media’. His assessment is brutally accurate in this instance. The Prime Minister fed his media addiction with a headline that the new government will ‘force MPs to finally capitulate to a full working week’. The Prime Minister knows that most of us work every day of every week and most weekends, and many people struggle to find time to spend with their family and friends. He knows that his colleagues work hard, but the allure of a cheap headline was just too much for him.

Today, through this motion, the Rudd government has revealed its true nature. We see a government and a Prime Minister focused on the five-second grab, the empty rhetoric and the cheap stunt—a government that is more interested in an easy headline than in the hard work of government. The Prime Minister’s cliches and slogans are fast becoming the stuff of legend, yet beneath the veneer of the slogans what do we find? We find, on the one hand, an education revolution that is nothing but a laptop delivered to high school students and, on the other, his cutting of $1 billion in funding from primary schools through the abolition of the Investing in Our Schools Program and his empty promise to solve the skills shortage by providing every school with a lathe and a microwave while simultaneously abolishing the highly successful Australian technical colleges that provide secondary students with specialist technical training.

This week we had the Prime Minister’s crocodile tears about standards in literacy and numeracy, which coincided with his announcement that the government will abolish a $500 million tutorial program to assist struggling schoolchildren with literacy and numeracy. This is the Prime Minister who promised before the election to reduce the price of groceries and the price of petrol but who now says that he has no control over these things. This is the Prime Minister who railed on about infrastructure bottlenecks but who has asked for an urgent report to be on his desk in 2009—

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