Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The government, I should say; you are quite right. Well, if you go on the way you are you will be the opposition before you know it. That is where you should be, because the reality is that the government is in a hole tonight of its own making, because it assumed that the opposition would buckle and that the Independents, and particularly Senator Xenophon, would buckle and get out of the way of its bulldozer, but we did not and Senator Xenophon did not.

The Prime Minister has failed today. His economic policy is in tatters. His fiscal stimulus, so-called, has been rejected by the parliament of Australia. It has been voted against by the opposition—an opposition with whom he has refused to speak. President Obama, fresh from an overwhelming electoral victory, was prepared to go to the congress himself and sit down with Republicans, and he won support from some Republicans. We have had no attempt from the government to sit down and discuss this with us, and yet from the moment I became the Leader of the Opposition I have said again and again that we want to sit down and talk about these issues constructively.

It is not just the $42 billion spending package that is in tatters. The central element, the overwhelming element, of the government’s response to climate change, which the Prime Minister has called in the past ‘the greatest economic challenge of our time’ is being thrown overboard today.

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