Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I notice that almost the entire Labor caucus is in the chamber this morning to hear from the member for Paterson on the Health Insurance Amendment (New Zealand Overseas Trained Doctors) Bill 2009, but I can assume that it is because that was the Minister for Foreign Affairs’ leadership pitch speech this morning. That is why the Deputy Prime Minister is looking particularly pale and nervous this morning. She thought she would in fact be the next leader of the Labor Party. Good speech, Steve. I am not sure that it will necessarily convince the caucus that you are the man, but good luck to you.

The Acting Leader of the House and I had a conversation this morning and we understand the process. The House of Representatives often finds itself in this position at this time of the year. Because of the mismanagement of the current government, it is particularly vexed at this stage. Of course, we are particularly disappointed that there is no question time today, because we wanted to hold the government to account for its failed policies in areas of border protection and interest rates and inflation and unemployment and debt and deficit and defence, in particular—defence personnel, materiel and science—all the areas that we know the government is very vulnerable on and the government would hate to be held account for in question time today. We are happy, if the government chooses to, to have a question time today. We are quite prepared to come into the House and ask the questions that need to be asked about the government’s failures. I am sure the Deputy Prime Minister would admirably take up the cudgels against the opposition, as we would to them.

So we do call on the government to respect the parliament and have a question time. We understand this mechanism for the suspension of sittings means that this is not a new sitting day—we may have done that ourselves in government on occasion. However, we think this new broom sweeps clean all the fine talk from the Labor Party, the now government, when they were in opposition about the importance of the House of Representatives and question time and short answers and so on. We would expect them to do that in government and have a question time today and give us the opportunity to hold them to account. We call on the government to do so.

We in the opposition will patiently go through the processes today. We have some fine speakers ahead and we look forward to an early resolution of this delay by the Senate which is causing us to be here rather than at home in our electorates with our families, working for our good constituents.

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