Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, in addressing this matter, I want to pay tribute to the assistant minister at the desk. He is veritably the Winston Wolfe of this government. He's had to come in and clean up yet another mess, the complete mess that the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction has made of this bill. Why on earth anyone with authority decided to let the minister for energy do anything outside of his own portfolio, which is he is very busy messing up himself, is utterly beyond me and utterly beyond all of those on this side of the House.

But there are some serious issues, as my colleague the Manager of Opposition Business set out. They go to the accountability of ministers to this parliament. It doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to pick up the right speech. There are a couple of speeches before you and a few options to deliver, but it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to pick up the right summing-up speech for a second reading debate and deliver it to the parliament. But if you don't pick up the right speech—I've never seen it in my time; I haven't been here as long as the member for Watson has, but I don't think he has seen this happen before either—and if you don't realise you are delivering a speech that is completely unrelated to the bill before the House, at least have the courage and the honesty and the fortitude of character to come back to the House and admit your mistake. Don't send in the Winston Wolfe of the Morrison government to fix up this mess; come in yourself and show courage. This is the problem with this minister for energy: he makes mistake after mistake in his own portfolio; every now and then, he is allowed to mess up someone else's portfolio; and he refuses to come into this House and fess up. We've seen over the last week or 10 days, through the freedom-of-information process, WhatsApp messages from the minister's office around the dodgy documents scandal that the minister was involved in. We now know from those WhatsApp messages that even the night before the publication of the dodgy documents in The Daily Telegraph the minister's office had realised they got it wrong. They realised that, at some stage on that afternoon, after The Daily Telegraph contacted them and then an office member or a member of staff of the minister went back to the website—

See this speech in context