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

We just had from the member for Chifley: 'Put your money where your hyphen is'! The attempts here from the member for Kooyong are flawed by his own arguments. If he wants to talk about any of the issues that are substantial and decent debates to have, that involve significant savings to business, then by all means have that debate, but that is not what is in front of us. If he believes there are dozens of members from his own side who want to rush to support him, well, let them speak. We would love to hear their passion on punctuation! We would love to hear how hard they want to argue that what is happening today matters.

We would love to also hear the debate management motion that says there are going to be 1,000 sitting days scheduled for the rest of the term—given there are not 1,000 days left in the rest of term—for the Prime Minister to be able to meet the target.

What we have before us today is the ordinary business of getting rid of redundant legislation and bringing some other issues up to date. I have moved the amendment that I handed to the clerks. The debate should be allowed to run in the ordinary course that we give to non-controversial legislation.

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