David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection from the member for Casey. I heard his comments earlier about the hard hats. They are very sensitive on that side about hard hats. I did not see them wearing hard hats very often when they were in government, because they did not build anything; they did not believe in building the nation; nation building was not their priority. They get sensitive about the hard hats.

Just yesterday there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the hard hat. The member for Canning says that he was not the one who brought the hard hat in, but that it was the member for La Trobe. I will take his word for that. I was astonished that they had a hard hat nearby. They never needed one in their 12 years in office, because they did not build anything; they did not invest in the nation. But then it became a little bit clearer to me why he had such ready access to the hard hat: he needed it yesterday morning in the joint party room meeting—in fact, I think that they were standard issue.

Talk about division; talk about chaos and confusion. They do not know whether they are Arthur or Martha; whether they are greener or browner than the Labor Party when it comes to the CPRS. They do not know whether they support it or not. They have a leader who has said that he was the voice of reason—the voice of progress—in the cabinet. But now he is a stick in the mud; he is an obstacle; he is the speed hump that is blocking any progress on that front.

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