Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I am not accepting the intervention.

There are also some wonderful things in these bills which caused me to chuckle! Bearing in mind that we are seven weeks out from the budget, I wonder whether this is the best use of departmental staff time. I suspect that there are probably a few advisers that were shaking their heads and getting quite worried about the fact that there is real work to do. There are 11 different pieces of legislation that from now on will contain the word 'email' without a hyphen. Who in the department took time out from the important work of preparing the budget and preparing things for expenditure review to do that? Who in the department took time out from dealing with the budget emergency and from the extraordinary things this government had to do because things were so terrible, to do that?

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