George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

On all the topics the opposition explored with the government today, and even in the answers of ministers to some of the questions from their own backbench, what we have seen in the chamber this afternoon is the humiliating litany of failure with which the Australian public are increasingly coming to identify the Gillard Labor government. It is an extraordinary thing. Ordinarily when a government is re-elected—albeit this government was reinstated in office over a month ago in rather controversial circumstances—there is a degree of goodwill from the general public, there is a sense of ‘give the reinstated government a go’. But all of the anecdotal evidence, all of the empirical evidence and all of the opinion poll evidence that we have seen in recent weeks has shown that the Australian people have woken up to the fact that the Gillard government is no different from the Rudd government. The policy paralysis, the dysfunction, the indecision, the meandering directionlessness which became trademarks of the Rudd government are the same under the new management of the new Prime Minister, Ms Gillard. There is a reason for that and it is not hard to work out. What we now know is that all of the key decisions or nondecisions with which the Rudd government was associated were made by a small coterie of senior cabinet ministers, of which Ms Gillard and Mr Wayne Swan were the two leaders.

Mr Rudd was not terribly interested in domestic policy. Let us call a spade a spade: Mr Kevin Rudd was much more eager to grandstand on the international stage, leaving the direction of the government on domestic policy to Ms Gillard. After Ms Gillard stabbed him in the back on the evening of 23 June—after having undertaken in the most plangent, most earnest terms to both him and the Australian people that he had her complete support—after this ‘Lady Macbeth’ stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back on 23 June and seized control of the government—