Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is why they get upset; this is the problem. This is where it is hurting. What happens with the Labor Party is that they think they can do this little pas de deux, this little two-step, that it might not really affect them that much in Queensland and that they will pick up the seats somewhere else in any case. But, if this really and truly does become the straw that can break the Labor Party’s back at the federal election, they will change. I do not believe for one moment that an organisation that immediately expels members of their own who dare dissent, who dare cross the floor, does not have the power in that structure to change this. The last person in the Labor Party to dissent was Senator George Georges in 1987, and they immediately kicked him out. That is the sort of democratic organisation the Labor Party is! That is the absolutely tyrannical approach they have to their own colleagues, and now it is the tyrannical approach that they have brought upon the people of Queensland. That is it; it is in their culture. It is what they are. They hate dissent: you must walk in unison; you must walk to a tune. Then, when they are there for long enough, they say to the people that they are supposed to be governing for that they too must follow the culture that ‘if you dissent, you will be squashed; you will be completely and utterly suppressed’. How dare they dissent to the aspirations of the Australian Labor Party! This is what this is about. I would say that this is one of the most fundamentally important pieces of legislation we have had.