Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very conscious of that and I'm just going to say to the Manager of Opposition Business, the Prime Minister has withdrawn and he didn't have qualifiers. The qualifiers you're referring to in Practice are when there's another set of words added. There are two ways you can withdraw. I've asked the Prime Minister to withdraw, and he has done so. I'm going to remind members on both sides that the rules for this place are very clear: you cannot reflect on members or impute motives in any way, shape or form—we could end question time and I could discuss all the precedents going back many decades, if you'd like to—and that refers to groups of people as well. Otherwise, we'll have a situation like the one we had in the 1970s, when a group were imputed and the initial ruling had been that it had to apply to individual members, and we had a procession of members getting up on the same point of order.

See this speech in context