Robert Simms (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to engage in this debate. It has been said over the last few days that there has been a whiff of 1975 here in this place. Well, I will not have that, because I think that is an insult to former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. He was somebody who had a bold and exciting vision for the future of our country. Fast forward 40 years, and the contrast could not be clearer. What do we have? I am looking here at the Senate order of business: a blank sheet—a metaphor for the Turnbull government's approach, because it is clear they have no ideas and no vision for the future of our country.

This is supposedly the ideas boom, but really it is more bust than boom because they have come into this place with no ideas for the future of our country. Let us consider the way in which Mr Turnbull has dealt with some critical policy questions since he got the keys to the Lodge just six months ago.

I am going to start with the issue of marriage equality—one of my portfolios for the Greens, but also an issue that I know many, many Australians are concerned about. People believed, when Mr Turnbull became Prime Minister, that he would offer a different direction to Tony Abbott on this issue. They believed that he was someone who supported the cause of marriage equality and would actually make it happen. But what we have seen is him wedding himself to the absurd policy position of holding a plebiscite, with all of the cost to the Australian taxpayers that comes with that: a $160-million price tag to ask a question we already know the answer to. We know Australians support this reform and they want the parliament to deliver it. Yet Mr Turnbull is kowtowing to the conservative forces on his backbench—the likes of Senator Abetz and Senator Bernardi—who are really ruling the coalition roost and dictating the policy position of this Prime Minister. So, rather than providing a free vote for his colleagues, he has wedded himself to this toxic Tony Abbott plan—