Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

They are playing to the crowd! I really believe that we have to back off here a little bit and forget who has the political margin to play with, who is in front, who has the biggest loan and who has not. Maybe it is time for the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, Nick Xenophon and others to put their hardware on the table, maybe subject themselves to circumcision and revisit this debate. There were mistakes made at the start. The government tried to rush it because it has the numbers, and there have been mistakes made by the opposition. So if it does take another week, why can’t the parliament come together and design a strategy that does work? Then everybody would go away feeling as though they had been part of it. That is what we have done this week about fires and floods. This is in my view as bad as any war and, if we do not attempt to address this as a parliament and forget about some of the nonsense that has been going on behind the scenes, we will be judged very poorly by our communities. Thank you.

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