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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance and the Public Service (Senator Cormann) to questions without notice asked by Senators Watt and Kitching today relating to a party meeting and to energy policy.

Those questions related to the extraordinary late-night move last night of the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party to change the rules to make sure that they don't have to go through yet another leadership change of the kind that we saw recently—not that long ago—when Prime Minister Turnbull knocked off Prime Minister Abbott.

I think all of us were surprised when we read last night that an urgent meeting of the Liberal Party had been called, and there was lots of speculation about what that might have been about. But I suppose anyone who has been watching federal politics any time recently would know that an urgent, unplanned, extraordinary meeting of the Liberal Party would be called for the only topic that the Liberal Party seem capable of talking about at the moment—and that is themselves and their leadership. Everyone in this place knows that there are many, many challenges that this country faces such as the fact that, under this government, wages do not rise and do not keep pace with the increases in profits that we keep seeing going to big business, the natural allies of this government. That would be a topic that I would have thought it worth this government calling an urgent partyroom meeting over. But they never want to talk about that.

I suppose, to give them credit, they have called a number of urgent partyroom meetings to talk about energy policy. They had a partyroom meeting when they settled on the Clean Energy Target. Then they had a partyroom meeting when they ditched the Clean Energy Target. They had a partyroom meeting when they settled on the emissions intensity scheme and another partyroom meeting when they got rid of the emissions intensity scheme. More recently, they had a partyroom meeting when former Prime Minister Turnbull actually got support from his party room for the National Energy Guarantee. It actually got through their party room. Despite that, of course, a partyroom meeting had to be called not long after that to kill off something which they'd voted for not that long before. That reflects the level of chaos that we continue to see from this government, on energy policy in particular, but, really, on every matter that it deals with.

So nothing says stability like calling an urgent, unplanned, extraordinary meeting of your party at 9 o'clock at night on a sitting night. That's perfectly normal—that's how things should be run in any major political party. That's certainly how they're run in the Liberal Party. Not only was this meeting called at very short notice, late at night on a sitting night, but we had the laughable picture of senators running in and out of the meeting to come to divisions in here and to fill quorums in the chamber while their own legislation was being debated. It was more chaos from this government, something that we have become used to.

There is only one reason I can think of for why the Prime Minister was so keen to move this rule change early in the sitting week. You can imagine him sitting with Senator Cormann on the big plane coming back from Argentina, through the choppy clouds, thinking about what they were going to do in the sitting week and how they were going to make it through. Someone obviously had the brainwave to change the rules for the leadership, to make sure that nothing could happen again. I think we were all interested to note that one of the leadership pretenders for the future, and the past, Ms Bishop, was noticeably very late in getting to that meeting. I do wonder whether anyone bothered to tell Ms Bishop that this meeting was being held to change the leadership rules that she may have a very great interest in—certainly, after the election and, potentially, even beforehand. But, sadly for Ms Bishop, her own leadership aspirations seem to be delayed again by the boys in the Liberal Party. And now they've made it that little bit harder for her to ever reach the top job, which we all know that she wants to do.

Turning to other matters in the limited time I have left: it was good to see another contribution from the former Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, today on the National Energy Guarantee. He said that he has strongly encouraged his colleagues to work together to revive the National Energy Guarantee:

It was a vital piece of economic policy. It had strong support, and none stronger I might say than the current Prime Minister and the current Treasurer.

It is really sad when you look over at the Liberal Party: it seems to be that anyone who ever bothered to try to come up with a policy to deal with energy prices or a policy to deal with climate change—most recently, the NEG and anyone who supports the NEG—has no place left in the Liberal Party. Mr Turnbull was a supporter of the NEG. Of course, they got rid of him. They knocked him out of parliament altogether. Ms Bishop has been a supporter of the NEG and, of course, she was sent back to the backbench. And Julia Banks, the member for Chisholm, was a supporter of the NEG and she decided there was no place left for her in the Liberal Party.

The Liberals are totally focused on themselves. They call urgent, unplanned meetings in the middle of the night to change their rules but are never about the issues that Australians care about. (Time expired)