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

It is a situation, in moving this dissent motion, that we would not be in were there competence from the Minister for Social Services. The only reason, Deputy Speaker, that you have been placed in this impossible position is that the Minister for Social Services could not be bothered letting the parliament know that the entire debate we have just had on the age pension is in fact now going to be voted on as a fundamentally different proposition. Each side of the House has made speech after speech and yet, at the eleventh hour, he seeks leave to introduce amendments that completely gut the bill. Apparently, we discover now, the deal that he has been talking about with the Greens, and the deal that the Greens have been claiming that they have got, is not in fact what is going to go through the House today. With the entire national debate that has been happening during the week, the entire debate that has been happening within this House during the course of the week, we find out at the last minute that they now want us to vote with a whole lot of the measures completely taken out—that the deal with the Greens and the dollar figure that was apparently attached to that deal were entirely untrue.

We should have had a situation, had they not tried to sneak this through the parliament in the way they have, Deputy Speaker, where we would have been able to raise these issues in the normal way. If the Minister for Social Services had had the capacity to dial the numbers on a telephone and call the shadow minister, call the member for Jagajaga, then we would have had the debate in the normal way.

But instead, when this government tries to cover up, the Labor Party will call it out on it. When this government tries to cover up and avoid there being any sort of a decent debate, then we end up with the House again in chaos. We end up again with the chaos that has characterised this legislation, with the chaos that we have seen during the course of this week from those opposite, now once again on full display here within the House of Representatives. Deputy Speaker—

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