George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

We express disappointment but we will not be abusing him in the way, for example, we saw former Senator Robert Ray conduct the most vindictive personal campaign against Senator Mal Colston that any of us can remember. We will not be doing that. We will be treating Senator Bernardi as a professional colleague, with appropriate professional courtesy.

Senator Wong, you observed cheaply, if I may say so, that there is division on my side of politics. The departure of one person from a party room of more than 100 hardly constitutes division, particularly when I look across this chamber and I see not one party of the Left, but two. I see the 26 Labor Party senators but I also see their mortal rivals and enemies, the nine Greens senators. Do you know, Mr President, that if you examine the statistics from the last federal election they reveal something very instructive. Do you know that, if you were a young Australian, a person under the age of 30, whose political sympathies lay with the Left, you were as likely to vote for the Greens party as you were to vote for the Australian Labor Party. So, please, Senator Wong, we will not be having any lectures from you about division in politics when your entire electoral base is being gradually, indeed, not so gradually but fairly rapidly eroded by your rivals on the Left of politics—the Australian Greens. Nor will we be hearing sententious lectures from you, Senator Wong—the person who sits in the same party room that former Senator Mal Colston once sat.

So, Mr President, this is a sad day for the Liberal Party. It is a sad day when somebody leaves the family. Senator Bernardi will have to account to the Australian people and to his own conscience about how he can continue to sit in this parliament, having been elected as a Liberal—but that is a matter for him. We in the government will proceed with the important business of making Australia secure and prosperous. We have a very busy agenda in 2017, and we look forward to working with every senator for the best interests of our country.