Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is falling apart at every instance. What do we see? We saw last week a leaking to News Ltd journalists—The Daily Telegraph, a fantastic publication, I may point out—of a hit list from senior government sources of who is in and who is out. I was pretty shocked to see the Leader of the Government in the Senate on that hit list. I was pretty shocked and horrified and pretty disappointed, I have to say, that his colleagues would put him on that list. There were people on that list who surprised all of us. This is no conspiracy on the fringes. This is no ABC/Fairfax campaign running against the government—I believe the term used was 'jihad', but inappropriately. Six out of eight ministers who were contacted by Fairfax journalists talked about the idea of the inevitability of a leadership coup. What did we get on the weekend? The gold quote of the year from a government MP: 'Say it to my face and I will smash his in.' 'Say it to my face and I will smash his in.'

Dysfunction and disorder—a government that has completely fallen apart before our very eyes. They turn around and say, 'It's all gossip. It's the glitterati.' These are their own members of parliament, their own ministers, their own cabinet talking about their cabinet. I say to those opposite: if that is what you think of your own government, imagine what the people out there are thinking of your government right now. They go on about gossip columnists and attack them. They say that it is only at the fringes. Well, I have to say that I do not believe that Laurie Oakes is some kind of fringe-dweller. I do not think Laurie Oakes is that kind of journalist. If you saw what Laurie Oakes said on the weekend or the news reports last night, they have such little faith in their own government and such little faith in their Prime Minister that there is actual talk of a leadership spill this week. They just cannot trust the bloke to go out there and destroy their electoral prospects simply to retain his own job. The question has to be: whose job is he actually trying to protect?