Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

As my children sometimes say: 'How embarrassment.' How embarrassment that we can't even make it to the end of the second sitting day of this new term before this government runs out of an agenda. They've got not one piece of legislation ready to go. You can just imagine Senator Cormann's office this afternoon. They've worked out that they're going to run out of legislation by about 8.30 tonight—two hours before we're actually supposed to wind up on the second sitting day of the entire term. They've thought, 'Oh, jeez, we better get something organised—we better send out an email.' So they've got an email out to Senator Paterson, Senator Stoker, Senator McKenzie and the others saying: 'Jeez, guys, can you write up a speech? We've run out of legislation to talk about. We need you to get up and blabber on for 20 minutes each just to filibuster until we can get through to tomorrow.' What's going to happen tomorrow? You know what: tomorrow you haven't got to fill two hours—you've got to fill an entire day! You won't have a hope! Should we just call off parliament by about, what, two o'clock tomorrow afternoon? You will have completely run out of stuff.

If you haven't got legislation ready to debate here tonight, what gives us any confidence that we should remain here for the rest of the week? I've travelled here from Queensland and Senator Wong's come from South Australia. Senator Pratt and Senator Dodson are here. It takes Senator Dodson three days to get here! He's ready to debate legislation. You guys can't get your act together to have more than a couple of bills that everyone agrees with. What this shows, once and for all, is that this government did not expect to win the last election and has no agenda whatsoever for this third term. They are a tired, third-term government out of ideas and without an agenda. They had one idea that they took to the election—tax cuts. They got that done last week, and now they're out of things to do.

You know what? There are actually a lot of issues that the Australian public would like to see this government deal with. Let's start with wages. Wages under this government are barely rising. How about you introduce some legislation to reverse your penalty rate cuts? That might be a good start. How about you give a few more powers to the regulator to stop all the rampant wage theft we're seeing around the place? I'll give you a whole batch of private members' bills that I'm happy to stay back and debate. In fact, I'll move to extend hours if you want to!