Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Families and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for International Development and the Pacific (Senator Fierravanti-Wells) and the Minister for Regional Communications (Senator McKenzie) to questions without notice asked by Senators McAllister and Gallacher today relating to the Turnbull Government.

We saw something quite extraordinary in the chamber earlier today. The government introduced amendments to amend its own legislation, which used to seek to extend the tax cuts to the banks but now excludes the banks. Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that we would see this government turning its back on the two things which can truly be said to define it—a love of the banks and a love of corporate tax cuts. Unbelievable! These seemed to be the two issues that this government was willing to take any amount of political heat on to pursue. They resisted the royal commission until the banks had the good sense to understand that, unless they asked for one, unless they wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, this wouldn't come to an end. But now tax cuts for banks seem set to join the pile of policies that the Prime Minister has sacrificed to try and save himself.

Think about the republic. Just reflect for a moment on this. After the referendum, Mr Turnbull said, of the then Prime Minister John Howard, that he had broken the nation's heart. Now that Malcolm Turnbull is in the Lodge, what has he done? In the last 12 months he floated briefly the possibility of a plebiscite after Queen Elizabeth ceases her role. He was forced within 24 hours—within 24 hours!—to burst his own thought bubble, because he is willing to put aside anything and everything he believes in if a backbencher raises his or her voice against it.

On climate change Mr Turnbull once said:

Climate change is real, it is affecting us now, and it is having a particularly severe impact on Australia. And yet, right now, we have every resource available to us to meet the challenge of climate change except for one: and that is leadership.

The Prime Minister used to say that he offered leadership on climate change. In fact, he crossed the floor 10 years ago to vote for the emissions trading scheme. He said, 'I will not lead a party that is less committed to climate change than me.' Well, not yesterday, because yesterday he capitulated again—again to those who had a fundamental beef with science, who urged him to drop any reference to the Paris commitments, to the commitments to emissions reduction, in his redesign of the energy system, and he just gave in. He gave in to save his own skin. What does this man stand for? I will tell you: he stands for absolutely nothing except himself. The only project that the Prime Minister has thrown himself into, without equivocating, without holding back, is himself—the Turnbull project—and despite this project consuming all of his political energy, he hasn't even done it that well. Thirty-five members of the Liberal Party party room don't want him as leader. If you add in the National Party, it starts to become a much bigger number indeed. But even for the Liberal Party that's 41 per cent of the party room, which is almost as much as the 55 per cent of Australians who don't want him as Prime Minister, according to the latest Ipsos poll.

It is often said of Mr Turnbull that he does not lack confidence—that he's possessed of extraordinary self-belief. Well, it is good that he has confidence in himself, because nobody else seems to at all. Today in question time we saw minister after minister falling over themselves to avoid saying that they supported him. Senator Fierravanti-Wells wouldn't even repeat his name. She couldn't even bring herself to say his name out loud when I asked her if she supported him and what he stands for.

I don't know where we go from here. How does the Prime Minister stand in the parliament without flinching, knowing that the member for Warringah and the member for Dickson are sitting behind him. Worse, how does he stand in front of the mirror, looking at himself and knowing that selling out everything—everything that he once believed in—doesn't seem to have won him a single vote from the Right. In fact, the great lesson in all of this is that the more you capitulate to the bullies, the more you give in, the more they ask for. You can never win by capitulating. I say this to Mr Turnbull: have the courage of your convictions and call an election.