Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am being warned by the Father of the House. As he says, many come and go. I am well aware of that, but I think this government of bed-wetters will see more go than most, with all due respect to the Father of the House—I wish him luck in his preselection; I have been reading about it in the paper. I hope Julian Lesser is listening to this. I am sure he is an avid listener to the goings on in this House and has been for many years, as I understand. He has had many years of waiting there in the Liberal Party branches. But I am not talking about education, which I should be. I do not really want to talk about the preselection or the election chances of those opposite.

If you cut $30 billion out of education and try and foist $100,000 degrees on people, if you cut $2 billion out of skills and if you cut a billion dollars out of apprenticeships, do you know what happens? People do not like it. What we have had in education is ignorance by Mr Abbott, ignorance by the member for—what is he the member for? I cannot remember. He is staying in parliament to improve the bus routes of Manly or something, apparently. We have had ignorance from Mr Abbott followed by neglect by Mr Turnbull, who has been in power for 142 days and has come out with one policy—one policy!

And we have got two of the plotters here, sitting with rather smug smiles on their faces. They are the winners out of all of this, of course. They were plotting out there in Queanbeyan or somewhere. I cannot quite remember where. Some of them were promoted—not all of them. We have replaced a prime minister, a treasurer, a defence minister, an industry minister and a communications minister—the majority of the National Security Committee of cabinet—and we have had one policy! On everything else, we have had just inaction. There is nothing going on.

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