Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying earlier, Labor has a policy of ratifying the Kyoto protocol and, if we are elected at the next election, we will be able to put that policy in place. That is the way we will be approaching this. We have had that on the record now for a very long time.

I feel provoked by Senator Macdonald, who stood up in this place and said that he has always supported constitutional recognition. Indeed, the Liberal Party, I thought I heard him say, has always supported constitutional recognition. In fact, that is not the case. I ask senators opposite: what does the Prime Minister say about constitutional recognition of local government? In 1988 the Prime Minister said that it would unbalance the Constitution.

Minister Lloyd was incapable of offering the coalition’s support to constitutional recognition when he had ample opportunity to do so at the Local Government Association of Queensland conference just a few weeks ago. Whilst National Party and now Liberal senators run around professing support for this, it is not a policy of the coalition government, and the Labor Party calls on the coalition government to make it a policy. You cannot mouth those words and expect the electorate to have respect for the party if you do not then make it a formal policy. We all know that the way to get constitutional recognition to become a reality in Australia is not through this pathetic blame game on the states that Senator Macdonald offers—the idea that somehow the Labor states do not support this policy.