Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I haven't looked at Twitter in the last 30 seconds. Things may have changed more! And, no doubt by the time I sit down after making this contribution, there will be five more contenders for the Liberal Party leadership. So, even though I've only been here two years, this could well be the last speech that I make during this term of government, such is the level of instability in this government. It actually isn't a laughing matter, because we all know that, with this government remaining completely directionless on energy policy and so many other issues since the day of the last election and even before that—since Mr Turnbull took over as Prime Minister—the losers have been the Australian people. There is no greater example of that than the issue that we're debating here today: the government's failure to deliver an energy policy which can keep power prices down for Australian households and businesses and can ensure a reliable supply of electricity to those households and businesses.

On the issue of energy, we've had five years of division and inaction on energy policy from, first, the Abbott government and then the Turnbull government and, no doubt, from whatever government might come next on the other side of politics, and the only losers have been the Australian people in the form of increasing power prices and decreasing power reliability. Over the last couple of years alone—and, probably, if I think about it hard, over the last 12 months—we've seen at least three different iterations of an energy policy from this government. First of all, they were going to have a clean energy target, and that got shot down by Tony Abbott and all the climate change deniers. Then they were going to have an emissions intensity scheme, and that got shot down by Tony Abbott and all of the climate change deniers. They finally limped along, trying to cobble together something called a National Energy Guarantee, which no-one really understood. Even the government didn't know what it would actually involve, And, piece by piece, Tony Abbott and all of the other climate change deniers in the coalition have chopped it away until it is actually just a shell. It is a phrase—'the National Energy Guarantee'—that means nothing, has no content and can do nothing to actually drive down power prices and increase power reliability.

At every stage of this debate over the last 12 to 18 months, as the government has put up different options around an energy policy—whether it be the clean energy target, the emissions intensity scheme or, now, the NEG—the Labor Party has actually resisted the opportunity to play politics. At every stage, the Labor Party has offered the hand of bipartisanship to this government in an attempt to put together a workable policy that can actually respond to what the Australian people want, which is lower electricity prices and a more reliable power supply.

As an observer of the Rudd-Gillard years and from talking to people who were here during that period of time, I can assure you that the Labor Party knows very well how politically damaging and risky the issue of energy policy and emissions reductions can be. We saw it when we were in government. We saw the problems that were caused when people tried to play politics with energy policy and emissions reductions, and that's why we have so consistently offered to work with the government to come up with an energy policy. It might not be exactly what we want. In every single one of these different schemes that the government has put up, there have been things that we would have preferred to see done differently, but we've consistently offered to work with the government and avoid taking the political route to shoot them down—even though it would have been easy to do so in every single case—in order to try to get to a policy that would help the Australian people. But every time we've offered that hand of bipartisanship to the government, they have been unable to put out a hand because they've got so many different hands out offering so many different options because they cannot come to an agreement on one policy that their entire party can get behind.

Every time they put up one option, Tony Abbott criticises it. Then they'll come up with another option, and the National Party criticises it—and so it goes. As I say, Labor is left waiting there every single time, looking for a willing partner in the government who's prepared to work together to come up with an energy policy. We're left standing on the sidelines, without a willing partner and without a capable partner who can actually come up with an energy policy that works. We've had five years of division, five years of inaction and five years of increasing power prices and decreasing power reliability, and that can be 100 per cent laid at the feet of this government and its incapacity to manage its own internal affairs and to put the interests of the Australian people above government members' own personal ambitions and need to settle scores and carry out vendettas over past leadership changes. Even today, they still can't decide what they want to see out of an energy policy.

We know that, along with the disastrous results of the by-elections only a few weeks ago, particularly in Longman and Braddon, it is their inability to come up with an energy policy yet again that is driving the most recent leadership crisis. As usual, as we have seen every other time an energy policy has come up, Tony Abbott and his colleagues have been sniping at it from the sidelines, even though he said he was never going to snipe and never going to do whatever else he has done every single day of the week. Because of that, it's well beyond a leadership crisis; it's a crisis of government in this country. This government, if you can call it that, is, to quote my good friend Senator Cameron, 'an absolute rabble'. It is not a joke. It is actually a tragedy to see an Australian government so dysfunctional that it can't even work out a process to work out who its leader is going to be.

If you were watching Senate question time today—you didn't have the opportunity to watch the House of Reps question time because the government chickened out and shut down the House of Representatives, so we enjoyed the fact that we had a pretty full gallery here to watch us in Senate question time for a change—and you looked over at the other side, you'd have seen the number of gaping holes in the government frontbench, with ministers missing and ministers walking out. It actually looked like a big piece of Swiss cheese: holes here, holes there, a little bit here, a little bit there. That is what this government has become. It is a piece of Swiss cheese that is barely hanging together because of the number of holes that have been made by ministers resigning and walking out on this government. It has got to the point now that, with the number of resignations by ministers in the Senate, there are not enough Turnbull backers on the government's backbench in the Senate to fill the number of vacancies that have been created. Even if Malcolm Turnbull was to survive as Prime Minister and wanted to promote a few people, pick a few people from his backbench and fill some of the vacancies that have been caused by these resignations, he doesn't have enough people to fill those spots. That demonstrates how little support there is for this Prime Minister in the Senate, and it demonstrates exactly how unworkable and dysfunctional this government has become.

In essence, just like the famous Monty Python parrot, this government has ceased to be. There is not really a Prime Minister anymore. No-one really knows who the Prime Minister is and no-one actually believes that it's Malcolm Turnbull. So there's no Prime Minister. There's no cabinet. There's no ministry to speak of because they're disappearing like flies. There's actually no government because no-one knows who's running the government and they have no idea where they want to take the country, whether it be on energy policy or anything else.

Now, the Labor side of politics did learn the lessons of the division that we saw during the Rudd-Gillard governments. We learnt the lessons and, as a result, for the last five years we have been incredibly united and stable and focused on coming up with policy ideas that will actually fix the problems that the average Australian faces—and wants their government to focus on rather than focusing on themselves, on getting ahead and on becoming the new leader of the country.

As things stand—and I've been talking for nearly 10 minutes, so who knows what's happened in that time—we have four declared candidates for the leadership of the Liberal Party and the prime ministership of this country. The current Prime Minister, so to speak, Mr Turnbull, is still hanging in there, hoping that they won't come up with the number of names required for a petition. We've got Mr Morrison; he has put his name forward. We've got Mr Dutton, of course. We've got Ms Bishop there as well. I've even seen reports our old friend Mr Abbott might resurface and have another crack. I can tell you that all on the Labor side are very much looking forward to that! So we've got at least four declared candidates. But whoever it is, whoever takes on the leadership, it's going to be a disaster.

Debate interrupted.