Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

You have got enough to do: you just keep your head down and watch your preselection. There is a point to be made. Isn’t this funny? This is the very point I was being shouted down on last night by Senator Carr, that big voiced leftie. Now I am getting shouted down and interjected on yet again by the Labor Party backbench. The point I was trying to make was: where is the Labor Party backbench on the speakers list? There is not one of them. Not one of them is on the speakers list. Senator Forshaw, yet again, has failed. He never got up on the ETS and he is not getting up on this issue.

We are told this debate about private health insurance is a possible election trigger, coming through the Senate for the second time—that this will be raised by the Rudd Labor government as an election issue. But not one of them is passionate enough to get up on their feet and debate this coming election issue. It is bit different on this side. We have packed the speakers list. That is the very point. That is the point I was making: not one of them has the courage or the wit or the rebellion in them—if that be the case, being so suppressed by the Prime Minister’s office—to stand up and speak on this issue that you say you are going to carry to the next election, that you say is possibly going to be a double dissolution trigger.

I am not surprised, because this is probably the most cowed and compliant backbench ever in this parliament. The Victorian senators are the worst. They would have to be the worst lot of Victorian Labor senators ever to come through here. I have never heard them get up and speak—not very often anyway, and certainly not on issues of gravity. I am not surprised, because we have the most compliant cabinet ever elected to government. They are willing to sit and have cabinet meetings on Thursday nights, after long sessions of parliament, when everyone is tired and itching to get home. The Prime Minister tells them, ‘We’re having cabinet meetings every Thursday night now.’ They are tired, they are not listening and they are dominated by the Prime Minister. It is a compliant cabinet.

This is a weak and pathetic government, and we are seeing that in the legislative program. It is coming through—don’t think it is not—the legislative program. You are ending up in a shambles and in disarray. You have a whole list of ministers that are now starting to fail after two years in the job. There is of course Mr Garrett. Could one minister be more incompetent? My memory goes back to Ros Kelly. I can tell you Mr Garrett has surpassed that piece of political folklore. Mr Garrett and his pink batts will surpass Ros Kelly and her whiteboard, now part of political folklore. But we are not short of them here in the Senate. We have Senator Conroy, the minister for good times, a good time Charlie—always has been a good time Charlie. Well, his good time Charlie days are about to end. And, of course, there is Senator Arbib. Now there was a nervous Nellie at question time yesterday! What a nervous Nellie Senator Arbib was, because he knows only too well he is caught up in the whole incompetence of it all. But there is more to the abandonment of the legislative program of the other side. And here comes their whip, who does all the spruiking for—