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

I think you should take a point of relevance then. Given that the minister's summing up speech was about another bill, I think it will sound rather ill in your mouth, Assistant Minister, to take a point of relevance on this. Anyway, the staff members realised that they had read the wrong document, that they had been led astray, and that was about to be published the next day. One of the staff members sends a WhatsApp message to another staff manager that says, Am I reading this right?' They've realised it is not a few thousand dollars, which is the actual figure on the website. They've told The Daily Telegraph that $1.4 million was spent by 10 people on domestic travel in 12 months. Again, it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to do some pretty rudimentary maths and work out that that is $28,000 of domestic travel per person every week for 50 weeks of the year, which is about 20 return flights, every week, per person, from Sydney to Melbourne—and also, if you can find some time between those flights, six or seven flights from Sydney to Perth every single week. But no, they didn't realise that! So the staff member sends a WhatsApp message to the minister—again, before this has ever broken, at a point where they could have pulled it back if they had had the fortitude of character to do so—and says: 'Boss, just a heads up for tomorrow: it's a bit messier than we'd hoped.'

This is a minister who makes a mess of every single thing he touches. There's a lesson from this: do not let this minister touch another portfolio; he's already busy enough messing up his own. And it's not just other colleagues that have to fill in for his mess; we now seen Matt Kean, the New South Wales energy minister, to his credit, having to fill in because this Commonwealth minister is completely incapable of putting together an energy policy that will pull through the investment in renewable energy that the state of New South Wales needs with its fleet of ageing and increasingly unreliable coal generators. Again, a New South Wales Liberal government has had to step in. It's been able to pull together the National Party, the Liberal Party and the Labor Party in New South Wales and put together a very impressive energy policy that will fill a space left by this minister's complete ineptitude.

What really grates with us on this side, though, is not just the minister's ineptitude, his inability to add up, his inability to pick up the right speech; it is the lack of moral fortitude. Any reasonable person would come into this chamber and say: 'I got it wrong. I apologise for the inconvenience to other members of this House for having to come back and do this all over again'—for the Winston Wolfe of the Morrison government having to clean up his mess again. But he just hasn't got it.

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