James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate with great sympathy for those opposite. I imagine that when their Senate tactics team sat down and devised the MPI question for today it would have seemed quite a good idea at the time. It might have been when Senator Dastyari was still a member of the tactics team and they thought, 'We'd better make sure, on the hundredth day of the Turnbull government, that we have a motion to debate their failure in their first 100 days.' Unfortunately, timing is everything in politics. Who could have imagined that the day on which they brought a motion to the chamber to debate our failures would be the same day that we had a great success in this chamber—that is, passing a tax cut for 500,000 Australians.

I do not want to appear ungrateful. I love it when the parliament passes tax cuts, but I do have one small complaint to make, one quibble, which is that on this occasion, with this tax cut, we did not go to a division. I was looking forward to sitting on this side of the chamber to vote in favour of a tax cut. But I am sure there will be many more to come in the parliament in years ahead.

Unfortunately for the Labor Party, this has also been a very good week for the Turnbull government, because that was not the only momentous bill we passed this week. We also passed a bill to protect CFA volunteers, something very important to people in my home state of Victoria and something very important to the 60,000 people who volunteer for that service. It of course follows our great success in the previous sitting week, when we were able to pass, thanks to those opposite—thanks for your support—$6 billion of savings in the omnibus bill. Again, that is another great achievement of this government in this parliament, something I very much enjoyed participating in and hope to participate in many times to come.

I realise as the chamber is filling that it is not to hear my scintillating contribution to this MPI debate, although I am flattered. I might yield the rest of my time so that we can get to maiden speeches.