Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You may have heard that today is the six-month anniversary of the Prime Minister promising Australia that good government would start today. It is six months since the Liberal Party stared into the abyss and weighed up that difficult choice between the Prime Minister and an empty chair, and selected the Prime Minister—all but 39 of them. And those 39 doubters—and I am sure there are a couple of them sitting across from me as I speak—were promised change. They were promised that good government would start today. There would be a reset. The barnacles would be carved off.

Unfortunately, it has been six months in a leaky boat, six months with a mutinous crew , six months of captain's call after captain's call, floundering on the rocks of political misjudgement. It has been six months of good government that has left 800,000 Australians on the unemployment queue; a good government that has sacrificed the jobs of hundreds of workers at the Williamstown shipyard in my electorate in order to try and save the job of Christopher Pyne in Adelaide; a good government that is using the strategic naval shipbuilding capacity of this country as a political pawn to move around the chessboard in order to cover the PM's latest disastrous captain's call to abandon the Liberal Party's election promise to build our submarines in Adelaide at ASC and instead to do a secret deal with the Japanese Prime Minister. This six months of good government is a bad joke. The Australian people deserve better, and at the next election Bill Shorten's Labor Party will give it to them.