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

Can I open by making it clear that I will be moving an amendment at the end of this speech. I say that now because it is to be seconded by the member for Chifley and I thought if I flagged it early he might still be in the chamber. If he is not, I have the member for Wakefield, but those odds usually are not good either.

Madam Speaker, if you listen to the arguments that were just offered by the member for Kooyong, effectively he has provided all the arguments as to why this gag motion should not be agreed to. In the first instance, he has said that dozens of his colleagues will be supporting him in arguments today. With 15-minute speeches, if he had only two dozen of his colleagues make speeches we would have six hours of debate, which he is about to say cannot happen—and that would presume there were no speeches at all from the other side. To claim that dozens of his colleagues are going to want to speak in support of this at the exact same moment he is moving a motion to deny them the opportunity of that shows the lack of judgement that is being applied in the motion. It is not often you get a gag motion that even the Leader of the House is too ashamed to come in and move. That does not happen very often. But on this one the member for Kooyong has managed to find shame even within the parliamentary principles that are put forward by the Leader of the House.

The member for Kooyong made another thing clear during his speech. He went through all the examples of deregulation that he thought were noteworthy. The problem was that they were not the ones that are before us today. They were not the issues before us today.

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