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

This is true! But it is arrogance or incompetence. You can pick from the interjector which one each person falls into. But what the Treasurer has tried on in the parliament today is outrageous.

There has been a system in this House for 100 years or so that you introduce a bill and then you adjourn the debate to give people a chance to work through the implications of the amendment. Of course the amendment is an amendment to a bill of many pages, and you need to be able to work through the full implications of it. You need to have the scrutiny and you need the parties to be able to consider it. That is called proper governance. That is the idea, and those opposite do not have a clue. The Treasurer has tried to con the Australian people, to con the parliament with this, and the Labor Party will have nothing to do with that. Can you imagine the Hansard? There will be page after page that will be blank. There will just be page numbers at the bottom, which will be easier for the Hansard editors than what they have to do when the Deputy Prime Minister stands up—I will give them that. But we have been placed in an impossible situation. The parliament should not stand for the con that the Treasury is trying to get away with right now.

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