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

I withdraw, Madam Deputy Speaker. The reason standing orders must be suspended and this motion debated is that the parliament has a right to know why we should not have suspended the member for Dobell yesterday. He needs to be given the opportunity today in this parliament to speak for just 10 minutes to put his side of the story so that we know as members of parliament that we should not have suspended him yesterday—a motion that was defeated by the Labor Party, who yet again sided with the member for Dobell, as the Prime Minister did today. It will give the member for Dobell, if this motion is carried, the opportunity to explain that fabled line that must be crossed—a line that the Prime Minister could not explain and that Jason and the Argonauts would find difficult to find should they seek to look for it. The Prime Minister said on 30 April, and I referred to this in question time:

… I can tell you very clearly now what that election will be about. It will be about who you stand for, whether you stand for the privileged few or whether you stand for working Australians and their families.

The member for Dobell can explain in this House today whether he is one of the privileged few that the Prime Minister is standing up for or one of the battlers—one of the battlers in the HSU; one of the 77,000 average members of the HSU who get paid something like $500 a week while this member for Dobell raked in $500,000 of HSU members' money over a period of time.

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