Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

You would learn something from my books, I must say. In fact, you might learn a great deal. What I would suggest is this: the Prime Minister has mortgaged himself to the extreme right wing of the Liberal Party and, worse still, the extreme right wing of the National Party to get the keys to the Lodge. This is a mortgage that he now finds crippling. And that is now showing up in the public's attitude to this government. The people of this country, who had such high hopes and high expectations about what Mr Turnbull would bring to the job, have now been thoroughly disappointed. In fact, I think they are quite horrified. He is a man who has presented himself as being an ideas person. In the past, he was interested in an Australian republic, for instance. He has abandoned that. He is a person who said he was interested in equality before the law in terms of same-sex marriage and the like. He has abandoned that. Remember that he said they could never tolerate Tony Abbott's climate change policies—because they were fraudulent. Many years ago now, he made the point that it was a policy position that would not produce the changes we actually need to protect this country. But now, of course, he adopts it holus bolus. We have seen this in so many areas—a government divided, a government weak, a government directionless, a government that has no central commitment to the welfare of the Australian people—because the government's only obsession now is survival.

We have talked a lot about how they recovered from the disaster of the election result. What we know is that, in two years time, we will be at it again—because they cannot sustain the internal contradictions of this government. Given this Prime Minister's position in terms of popular attitudes he will either be rolled or he will be obliged to go to an early election. We know the circumstances in terms of when a writ is supposed to be issued for this chamber. We know that that circumstance means we have to have another election by 2019. If we are to maintain the joint proposition of House elections being held at the same time as Senate elections, an election for the Parliament of Australia will occur again in the early part of 2019 at the very latest. But, of course, we know that there is a New South Wales election at that time, so it is unlikely that the election will be occurring at the same time. It is very unlikely, though technically possible, that we will have an election over the summer period, in January. We could have it just before Christmas. That is possible but unlikely.