Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the House for his entertaining contribution. If there is a correct description of what they call repeal day, we heard it when the Leader of the House described it as a school carnival. If you walk outside you will indeed find that today's school carnival has been rained out. It is one of those school carnivals where people at the end of the day think that the hype and the anticipation was somewhat more exciting than the day they ended up with. We have before us today a debate where I suspect the more people look at the legislation the quicker we will get through the speaking list. It is pretty hard to build a whole lot of passion around what is in the bills before us. For weeks and weeks this parliament had almost no legislation before it at all, and now we have legislation before us we are suddenly going to say we support it being gagged!

I am not going to extend my comments beyond that. I find it amusing that government members have already, by the admission of the Leader of the House, discovered that they cannot make long speeches on this issue, and that is a mercy to them. If I had to play the role of whip in this debate, I would be encouraging people to keep their remarks as brief as possible too. There has never been a fizzer like repeal day is. I will deal with the substance of these issues when we get to the debate but, on the subject of whether or not debate today should be gagged, it ought not to be and I suspect the government are merely covering themselves from the humiliation of their speakers who, when they stood up to speak on repeal day, found they had little to say.

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