Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Ferguson is having a go at me about the amount of time I am taking in speaking. I want to make sure the chamber is aware of this. We have had some 15½ hours in committee debate. We have had some 21 hours on debate in the Senate on these bills. Anybody who looks at the Hansard will see what those opposite were trying to do. Australians know what you were trying to do. You wanted to delay the consideration in this chamber until you had a party room meeting to give yourselves time to destabilise your leader. What an extraordinary political campaign! This Senate has been a sideshow to your internal ructions.

I want to make a further point. The difficulty for the Liberal Party is this: what was in the national interest last week they are now preparing to walk away from. I would remind them that, for example, Mr Hockey said on 25 November:

… Malcolm—

Mr Turnbull—

is acting in the party’s interest and in the nation’s interest.’

He went on to say that the Liberal Party was ‘going to do the right thing on behalf of the Australian people’—and that was to vote for this legislation, as amended, and to vote for it in the time frame agreed with the government.

The question confronting all members and all senators of the Liberal Party is this: how is it that something that was in the national interest last week is now no longer in the national interest? How is it that something that was important and the right thing to do last week suddenly is no longer important and no longer right? I notice how quiet they have become, Mr President. The only difference is that the extreme hardliners inside the Liberal Party—