Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

This motion calls on the Senate but particularly the government to show some leadership rather than the B-grade governance we have seen in recent months and, most especially, during the period of this new Senate. Last session, with respect to leadership, we saw, as we can all understand and still see today, the budget chaos. Indeed, we saw Senate chamber chaos over the two sitting weeks at the end of the last period. We saw evidence of this yesterday in the discussion about the budget. I suppose I am calling this lack of leadership along the path of the Bs. It seemed, yesterday, that we do not talk about the budget anymore. There are not the dorothies about the budget that we saw in the past from government senators, and the government remains quite unclear about what it wants to do about the budget. In fact, some of the characterisations are practically in denial. We do not know whether we have a budget emergency or not. It depends on who you talk to and on what day.