Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker Whiteley. I am indebted to your generosity, as always. This MPI is about stable government, or more correctly the lack of stable government. What we have seen on the other side is all chaos. Instead of concentrating on combating the increasing economic uncertainty, the jobs crisis and the failure to get investment into this economy, we have seen infighting and desperate manoeuvres. We have seen Kevin Andrews attack the member for Wentworth, publicly run against the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, get smashed in the ballot and then do the most publicly sycophantic suck-up job to retain his defence ministership. This is the quality of them. The tragedy is that this impacts on our economy. This impacts on the future prosperity of Australia.

The truth is that all that they have changed is the salesman. The package is still a stinking carcass and it is still a used car of woeful proportions. They have just changed the used car salesman trying to sell the Leyland P76. That is what they are trying to do. They have replaced the member for Warringah with a man with some reputation. The new Prime Minister does have a reputation. He is a man who professes that his first love is for himself—so he has been honest at times! He is a man who will, I am confident, prove that the grass is always greener when you look at leadership stakes. He is a man whose management style—he ran his campaign on reforming cabinet government—has been referred to by Annabel Crabb, in her excellent piece 'Stop at nothing', as 'bad Malcolm'. She said:

Bad Malcolm, however, can be anywhere on the scale from distant to vicious, none of it good. Bad Malcolm is well known for blowing up at his staff … "He was not really interested in the tools he had; he just worked to bully them into getting the job done. If they were inappropriate for the job, he'd just keep bashing them against a rock until they were finished."

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