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

Some among us in this chamber will remember the late Rob Chalmers, the longest serving member of the parliamentary press gallery, who began his career when Ben Chifley was the leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1950 and who died last year. When I was a young senator I was befriended by Rob Chalmers and I remember having a conversation with him one day when I was very excited about a particular political event—I cannot remember what the event of the time was. He looked at me in an avuncular and indulgent way, I think, a little amused at my excitability about a transient political happening. He shook his head wisely and said, 'Ah, George, there was nothing as good as the split.'

I think—and if I can conjure the shade of Rob Chalmers in the chamber this afternoon—the extraordinary events that we have seen in the last six days which have riven this Labor government apart will be viewed by historians of the future as events that rival the split. Never before in Australian history, certainly never before in the living memory of any member of this chamber, has a political party been so deeply, so bitterly, so publicly, so poisonously divided as the Australian Labor Party has been in the last several days.

Of course it has only been public in the last several days, but we now know from the mouths of the principal protagonists themselves that this has been going on all along below the surface but not very far below the surface: the government of Australia was a seething well of hatred and poison and personal bitterness and animosity and distrust. I actually feel sorry for the decent people in the Labor Party that they have had to put up with this. We had some disputes on my side of politics in 2009, and I know how trying they can be. I know how corrosive of personal relationships they can be, but, if I may say so, nothing that has happened on the coalition side of politics ever, going back to the days of John Gorton and Billy McMahon and the early 1970s, even approaches this in its bitterness—an observation that comes not just from my side of politics but from Labor Party observers like the former Senator Graham Richardson himself.

The Australian people deserve better than this. It does not matter if they are a coalition supporter, a Labor supporter, a Greens supporter or a genuinely unaligned swinging voter; the Australian people deserve better. They deserve a government that conducts itself with even a minimal level of professional competency and skill. They deserve cabinet ministers for whom the conduct of the nation's business is a higher priority than fighting factional wars for control of the Australian Labor Party. They deserve better than to have the government of the nation consumed by internal power struggles and political games. At a time when the global economy is teetering on the brink of another crisis, they deserve better than to have a Treasurer who devotes his time to blackguarding his historic rival and enemy in Queensland Labor politics, Mr Kevin Rudd.

At a time of acute diplomatic difficulty in various parts of the world, including the possibility of a war in the Middle East, the Australian people deserve better than to have a foreign minister who is being white-anted by his own Prime Minister and her surrogates to the extent that he feels forced to resign as foreign minister. They deserve better than to have a Prime Minister whom her own ministers and her own backbench have felt so strongly to be untrustworthy that they have declared that fact to the Australian people. Mr Kevin Rudd, the senior politician of the Labor Party most favoured by the Australian public, put it very plainly when he said, three days ago:

Julia has lost the trust of the Australian people.

And so she has.

Let it never be forgotten that the only reason Ms Gillard became the Prime Minister of Australia on 24 June 2010 was that she lied to Mr Kevin Rudd when she assured him that, as his deputy, she would support him to the hilt. Mr Rudd learned to his cost how worthless that assurance was. Having secured the leadership of the Labor Party, and the prime ministership, by a political coup executed in the dark of night, Ms Gillard then fell across the line at the 2010 election and was elected as Prime Minister, albeit in a minority government, only because she lied to the Australian people when, on 6 August 2010, a few days before the election was to be held, she looked down the barrel of a television camera and said:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

We know that had she not said that, had she told the truth about her intentions, she would not have been re-elected. She seized the leadership of her party through deception and she was elected as Prime Minister in 2010 through deception.

Then, in the political circumstances of the minority government, she only managed to parlay her position into a commitment from the Independents because she told Mr Andrew Wilkie, the Independent member for Denison, that she would support his measures for poker machine reform. The moment, late last year, that the Labor Party, through whatever devious means—I hate to think of it—convinced Mr Peter Slipper, the member for Fisher, to neutralise his vote by becoming the Speaker, giving them one more vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, she dumped Mr Andrew Wilkie, and Mr Andrew Wilkie now says he was betrayed.

How do you beat that, Mr Deputy President? She became the Prime Minister in the first place because she lied to Kevin Rudd. She fell over the line at the 2010 election because she lied to the Australian people about the carbon tax. She was able to form a government in the hung parliament because she lied to Mr Andrew Wilkie about poker machine reform. Mr Rudd was spot on when, three days ago, he said:

Julia has lost the trust of the Australian people.

There will be an attempt, no doubt, to paper over the cracks and, Humpty Dumpty-like, to pretend that the pieces can be put back together. But I dare say that nobody would be so silly as to believe that the hatreds and the vendettas and the poison that beset this government, which have torn it apart in a public spectacle unprecedented in Australian history, will be easily washed away. We know that they will not be. We have a situation in which Labor elders like Senator John Faulkner, Mr Martin Ferguson and Mr Robert McClelland—three senior Labor politicians, all of whom I know and like and respect—have all, in their different ways, declared or acted on their lack of confidence in the government of Prime Minister Gillard. There are so many scores to settle. There is so much hatred, antagonism and poison bubbling below the surface.

This government is dysfunctional. Its ministers are not on speaking terms. Its ministers publicly denounce one another's lack of integrity. Its ministers are incapable of guiding the affairs of this nation. When there is a political deadlock like this in a democracy there is only one way to resolve it: take it to the people and let the people sort out the mess the Labor Party has created. (Time expired)