Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I noticed that there are some interesting changes to that bill too, Minister. What we have seen here today is the Deputy Prime Minister arrogantly refusing to acknowledge that the reason they have changed this bill is the opposition. She arrogantly refuses; it is part of the tactics. She is an extraordinarily clever lawyer; there is no question about that. She is an extraordinarily clever debater. She gets up in this place and answers questions through omission. That is what she does. She does not answer the question; she leaves out what she does not want to answer. The Deputy Prime Minister did that yesterday in question time. She is very clever; there is no question about that. But on this matter it is quite clear that these amendments were pushed by the opposition and pursued by the opposition. And credit should go to the opposition. It is to our credit that we pushed this. This was of great concern to private schools in my electorate, to independent schools who were very concerned about this information appearing on the front page of the Advertiser.

And, make no mistake, that is what the Labor Party do. That is what they do at the state level and that is what they will do at the federal level. What they do is build a case on their ideological agenda, put it through the newspapers and say: ‘Well, you know, they do have a lot of money; they do have a lot of resources. We should take a lot of resources off them.’ That is exactly what their intention was with that amendment. It was the school hit list writ large on its way back, the Deputy Prime Minister pursuing an ideological agenda. She arrogantly dismisses our role in this. She uses Senator Xenophon as a fig leaf, as the member for Sturt rightly identifies—an interesting fig leaf. She arrogantly refuses to accept our role in this because, of course, it is the greatest spin-run government in the history of the Commonwealth. Yesterday I mentioned the ‘decisive-o-meter’. We have not heard ‘decisive’ on this. This, of course, is a decisive decision to backflip on this.

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