Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to support the motion moved by the Manager of Opposition Business, not because it gives me any pleasure to see this motion of dissent in the House. I want to say that, in every other respect, Mr Deputy Speaker Slipper, your chairmanship has been exemplary—absolutely exemplary—but in this important respect you have, I regret to say, breached the ordinary standards, procedures and conventions of this House.

I have been in this House for some time and I have been involved, dare I say it, in a few pretty rugged parliamentary debates. I can remember being in this chamber when I was the Minister for Employment Services and moving a suspension motion on the then member for Dickson. I can remember—and I invite the clerks to go back and look at the Hansard and advise you on this very point—being subject to successive closure motions by the then opposition. If it was good enough for the then opposition to close government ministers within a few seconds of the resolution of a previous motion, if it was good enough for the occupant of the chair on that day to allow successive closure motions, the precedent has been set and we are perfectly entitled to move a closure motion on this minister, who has not learnt a new script since she got into government. It was all very well in opposition to run this anti Work Choices script—but you have got to govern now.

When you are a minister in this country, you cannot govern this country by constantly repeating a mantra of opposition; you have actually got to make decisions—and that is what this government has not done in the 3½ months in which it has been in office. I refer to no greater authority than the former Leader of the Labor Party, the former member for Werriwa, who has said that this new government has engaged in nothing less than a circus of symbolism since it has been in office. This stunt today is the very quintessence of symbolism. It demonstrates that, rather than get on with government, it is still running the same tired old script. It is basically an opposition which found its way into government because of the longevity of the incumbents, and now it is trying to work out what to do. That is the problem that this government has: it does not actually know what to do now that it finds itself in government. Come on! I say to members opposite, ‘Surely after all those years as union organisers, surely after all those years of delving deeply into workplace law, you must know something about this.’

I do not like it, but I accept that the former government lost the election. But, with our losing the election, members opposite are now in government, and they simply have to get on with the task of governing. Constantly running the sorts of stunts that we saw this morning, having deceived the opposition about their desire to get on with government business, having engaged in a rank act of deception, pulling on this stunt and then pulling that bogus point of order, which, unfortunately, Mr Deputy Speaker, you have upheld, really demonstrates that the former member for Werriwa, Mark Latham, is right—these guys do not know what they are doing. They are engaging in a circus of symbolism.

Frankly, the time of this parliament is being needlessly consumed by a government which should know better. It is constantly running the old lines at the behest of a minister for workplace relations who was moderately effective in opposition—I will grant her that. But the task is not to criticise the former government; the task now is to be a good government in the stead of the former government. I have to say that the longer this mob opposite is in place, the better the Howard government is going to look. The longer this mob is in place, the more likely that the people of Australia will look back to 2.1 million new jobs, a 21 per cent increase in real wages and a doubling of the real net wealth of Australians as a golden age to which they would like to aspire at the next election.

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