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

This is the Prime Minister who railed on about infrastructure bottlenecks and who has asked for an urgent report to be on his desk in 2009. One of his staff, in a moment of honesty, admitted this week that the Prime Minister’s 2020 talkfest of 1,000 people was not expected to come up with anything; it was simply designed to ‘give the impression’ that the government had long-term plans. This motion is all about giving an impression: the parliament is sitting on Fridays because the government has so much business to do.

We enter parliament in the knowledge that we are required to represent our constituents during sitting weeks, but this Prime Minister’s insatiable hunger for newspaper headlines has significantly increased the pressure on all members. While headlines are easy, I note that the Prime Minister has left it to the Leader of the House, the member for Grayndler, to clean up this mess—and now we know we are in trouble. The opposition will be here whenever the parliament is scheduled to sit, but this frantic scrambling to change the standing orders reveals that this decision was made without consultation, without any thought for the consequences and without any regard for the workings of the parliament—and, I suggest, without due regard to the legal and the constitutional implications.

The worst aspect of this proposal is that the Prime Minister of this country will refuse to attend question time on what will be a regular scheduled sitting day and neither will he answer a matter of public importance on a regular scheduled sitting day. His soaring rhetoric about higher standards of accountability has come crashing back to earth, deflated by the reality of this action. The government seeks to be very cunning in reducing the opportunities for scrutiny and accountability: it has provided itself with more time for government business early in the week so that government members can ‘shoot through’, according to the new member for Leichhardt—

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