Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For eight hours today, our IT and email systems would not work. In any normal week, you wouldn't point your finger at the member for Fadden and say that he'd exceeded our entire parliamentary download capacity, but this has not been a normal week. On Monday, we had 23 government senators get up and walk across to the other side of the Senate chamber and vote in favour of a white pride motion. Not to be outdone, on Tuesday, we had the Prime Minister of Australia announce that he wants the people of Wentworth to believe that he's going to move Australia's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he doesn't want anybody else in the world to believe that he means it. Later that night, we had the environment minister stumble into a restaurant in Canberra for the purpose of insulting the former Kiribati president, a potential Nobel laureate. On Wednesday, we had that same minister forced to explain why $80 million of the half-a-billion dollars granted to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation would be used for administrative purposes. That's a lot of photocopying! The National Party hate to be left out of a carnival. They thought that three days before a big by-election where the message is stability would be an excellent time to run a leadership contest. With all of this going on, you can't rule out the member for Fadden as the No. 1 suspect. (Time expired)