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

That is more than five complete question times gone—wasted—as a result of their opportunism and relentless negativism. It is not surprising, because when we do have a debate of substance, we find them wanting, time and time again. Their mindless opposition to our budget proposals comes through. Never before has a budget been brought down in this parliament which the opposition have chosen from day one not to ask questions about. They do not worry about the macroeconomic settings, jobs, programs, savings or the return of the budget to surplus in 2012-13. They have simply moved away, from day one, from trying to hold the government to account.

But their mindless opposition is a risk. They continue to say that they will oppose savings measures in the budget without saying where the alternatives will come from. We know that that is the case from their own statements. We know that there is chaos in the opposition as a result of their determination to claw back money that will be given back to pensioners, to claw back assistance that is given to industry and to claw back assistance that is given to working Australians. Indeed, a senior Liberal was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald today as saying, 'You can't take money away from pensioners, it would kill us.' There we see the motivation of the Leader of the Opposition. He knows that he will not last the distance. He came in here after the August election and said to his colleagues on the front bench, 'I will keep the member for McKellar and I will keep all these jaded hacks on the front bench.' To those on the back bench—the future of the Liberal Party and the future of conservatism—he said: 'You just wait your time sitting up the back, Member for Mayo, Member for Higgins and others. You just be patient, because the government will fall at any second.'

For the first sitting of this parliament, for those five weeks, we actually had question time. Since then, we have had a Leader of the Opposition who is so scared of himself, so busy running away from his own side and so determined to acknowledge the fact that he will not last the distance that he is hell-bent on wrecking the parliament. The fact is that there has never been an opposition in history, since Federation, which has not regarded question time as the most important time for an opposition to hold government to account. But we see here an opposition that cannot hold government to account because at each and every turn they are skewered by their own history. The Leader of the Opposition's gave that great quote on Sky News on 29 July 2009:

I also think that if you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax? Why not ask motorists to pay more, why not ask electricity consumers to pay more, then at the end of the year you can take your invoices to the tax office and get a rebate? It would be burdensome, all taxes are burdensome, but it would certainly change the price of carbon, raise the price of carbon, without increasing in any way the overall tax burden.

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