Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

As the Deputy Leader of the Opposition points out, there is plenty of opportunity for this airline to increase their flights into Adelaide, if they chose to. There are plenty of rights to expand a range of other markets.

But I just want to explain to some of the members who have only been here less than a decade what is actually happening here. What is happening is a government is permitting a debate on a suspension motion. For those who experienced life under the last several years of the former government, particularly under the prime ministership of the member for Cook, this will be an utter novelty to them. Time and time and time again, every time the former opposition, now the government, sought to suspend standing orders to have a debate, we know what happened. Every single time, there was a gag. There were a record number of gags preventing the opposition from having any opportunity to raise a suspension of standing orders. For those who haven't been here for more than 10 years, this is what is happening. It is called an actual debate over a suspension of standing orders moved by the Leader of the Opposition. It used to happen very regularly when we were last in government. The then Leader of the Opposition, the then member for Warringah, would raise one of these things every 24 hours or so, and every time the debate was allowed to flow. So this is a novelty. I am sure we are all enjoying it. I am certainly enjoying it. It's much better than just having chamber duty and going through my correspondence.

At least the Manager of Opposition Business dipped his cap to some degree to the idea of a suspension, which is to argue in this chamber why standing orders and the usual business of the chamber should be suspended to deal with the subject matter of the motion that has been moved by the Leader of the Opposition. For those who, again, maybe haven't been here a very long time, this is quite an extraordinary circumstance. The Leader of the Opposition effectively marched the shadow Treasurer out of the chamber so that he was not able to deal with the matter of public importance that presumably he felt sincerely was a matter of public importance and had argued the case for in the opposition's tactics room. He decided not to seek the call to ask the Treasurer a question about GDP figures in spite of the fact that GDP figures were released this week. The Leader of the Opposition marched the shadow Treasurer out of the room. He wasn't quite a gazelle, like we all remember the former member for Sturt sprinting up the stairs one time, but it was a pretty extraordinary sight to see.

It reminded us again of yesterday, when the Leader of the Opposition forced the member for Canning, who clearly wasn't prepared, to second the dissent motion in the chair and went from being the next leader to the former next leader. It just shows the level of ruthlessness of this Leader of the Opposition. Not only does he play politics with the government, not only does he play politics with the Australian people; he plays politics with his own frontbench colleagues.

We were ready to have the matter of public importance debate. We all stood supporting the member for Hume, as we often do, and his intention to have a full-throated debate with the Treasurer of the country about the state of the economy. I have read the matter of public importance that the shadow Treasurer put before the parliament, and genuinely it is important. We on this side of the House understand, and I think some genuinely do on the other side as well, the pressures our economy is under and the degree to which those pressures are flowing right through Australian households and Australian businesses with the global inflation shock that swept through the world economy as we moved out of the emergency phase of the pandemic. It's an inflation shock that economies right around the world, including ours, are still coming to grips with. The degree of work we as the government have had to do on this side of the parliament, that the Reserve Bank has had to do and that businesses and households have had to do to deal with—

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