Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This amendment ensures that the Parliamentary Budget Office has enough powers to get from government departments the necessary information to ensure accountability and transparency. We in this House should all hold accountability and transparency in the highest regard. If there are two things that I get asked regularly about when I talk to constituents in the Riverina they are accountability and transparency—that is, why this government will not show any accountability or transparency.

I question why the parliamentary secretary will not come to the dispatch box and answer the questions that have been put him to tonight. I suspect it is because the government has gagged him. I suspect the government is not keen to have anyone talk too much at all in this House because of its haste to push through the Clean Energy Bill 2011, known across Australia as simply the carbon tax—the carbon tax the Prime Minister said we would not have as a nation under any government she led. I suspect that is why tonight we were to have 16 speakers, all of them from the coalition, debating the carbon tax until the adjournment at 9.30.

See this speech in context