Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition went further again on homelessness. On 16 February in the Sydney Morning Herald he said we just:

… cannot stop people from being homeless if that’s their choice.

That is his attitude, the great man of compassion, to homelessness.

He is also a great defender of workplace safety. There has been a workplace safety issue in this country over many decades, and that is the issue of asbestosis. People such as the member for Charlton and the trade union movement have ironically been quoted in here, for a change, by those opposite. The trade union movement led the charge to make sure there was justice for those victims. What we had from those opposite on that issue was extraordinary hypocrisy. On 30 October 2007, the late Bernie Banton had an appointment with the then Minister for Health and Ageing, the member for Warringah, in his office. That appointment was to submit a petition of more than 17,000 Australians to the then minister, a petition pleading for Commonwealth government support for action—something that this government has now put in place, it must be said. The then minister failed to turn up for the meeting—maybe there was something else on—but he could not resist going that step further. He blamed and condemned Bernie Banton, saying:

… it was a stunt … I know Bernie is very sick but just because a person is sick doesn’t necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things.

He was questioning this late, great Australian about his motives for wanting to protect his fellow Australians in his dying days. The member has form for crassness and crudeness. It is not just people in the Labor Party, the labour movement or the union movement who have suffered at the hands of the Leader of the Opposition. From what we saw in the battle in New South Wales between the hard Right and the extreme Right where the extreme Right won the preselection and knocked over the member for Mitchell’s candidate, we know that Tony has a long history of intervention in these disputes. On 31 August 2005, the day after the former New South Wales Liberal leader John Brogden attempted suicide, he went along to a meeting of health industry executives and said:

If we did that, we would be as dead as the former Liberal leader’s political prospects.

That is an indication of how this Leader of the Opposition treats his friends—treats members of his own political party. We have seen it before. We saw it during the last election campaign, and that is why this Leader of the Opposition, three leaders ago when he stood for the leadership after the 2007 election, could only get six votes in the ballot. It was front and centre of how this Leader of the Opposition performs during election campaigns. Remember him coming along to the National Press Club half an hour late—which was bad enough—and then choosing to abuse the now Minister for Health and Ageing because he could not defend his health policy: the billion-dollar cuts to health and freezing GP places. He said to her:

That’s bullshit. You’re being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you can’t help yourself, can you?

We saw it as well in his comments about the Deputy Prime Minister and others. The fact is that this Leader of the Opposition does always go a step too far. His extremism and the opportunism that we are seeing during this debate are typical of the way that he acts.

The Leader of the Opposition is suggesting that the environment minister is personally responsible for the deaths. As Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, I have some responsibility for the national road network, but it is not my fault or my personal responsibility if there is an accident on a road. We have a responsibility to act upon advice. We have a responsibility to do what we can to improve safety in whatever area we are in. That is why I have set up the National Road Safety Council. It is like suggesting that the current Leader of the Opposition is responsible for what occurred in the hospitals while he was health minister. If there was a mistake—and mistakes occur in hospitals funded by the Commonwealth government—it is like saying he was personally responsible for everything that happened in the industrial relations system. The opposition cannot resist. So desperate are they, according to their own words, that they are not prepared to put forward a positive agenda. Essentially, we have a Leader of the Opposition who, in his own words, says he is not interested in economics, he is not interested in fundamental debates that go to the heart of how we move forward and, of course, he is not interested in home insulation and other measures that are about dealing with climate change because this Leader of the Opposition has said that climate change is ‘crap’. That is his position. Once again, he went that yard too far, as he always does.

I conclude with this. Yesterday he had this to say in the Examiner in Launceston:

The only one of the Ten Commandments that I am confident that I have not broken is the one about killing, and that’s because I haven’t had the opportunity yet.

Once again, always that step too far. The problem is that, come the federal election campaign, we know and they know in the back that he will go that step too far yet again, as he always does. (Time expired)

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