Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator McAllister today relating to the Turnbull government.

Like the end of an empire, the death of a government is usually not pretty to watch. That, however, is what it seems we have been watching for the last few months on the front pages of newspapers, on the nightly news and in this chamber. People on the opposite side have been tearing themselves apart. In recent days that has intensified, as the blame and the finger-pointing and the gnashing of teeth continues about what went wrong in Queensland and whose fault it is. There are very different stories about whose fault it is, but the persistent theme coming through from many people speaking up very publicly—not respectfully in their party room but out there on Twitter, out there in the media—is that this is the fault of Mr Turnbull. It's starting to feel a little bit like that ominous feeling you get when you read Lord of the Fliesthat this is not going to end well.

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

Who's Piggy?

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Watt asks, 'Who is Piggy?' Some of the disunity and division is absolutely a result of clashes of personality and personal animosities. One gets the feeling, for example, that the former Prime Minister would not support the current Prime Minister on any question, even if there was absolutely no daylight between the two of them when it came to the policy. But this is much more serious than a clash between two men who can't decide who is going to hold the conch. Much of this division is actually about policy. Differences of opinion about policy and robust debate about policy are normally quite good and lie at the heart of good politics, but what we have seen from the government is not good policy or good politics.

The reason that this government is irreconcilably divided is that it has absolutely no purpose. Let's recall that the premise for the change in Prime Minister was 30 consecutive Newspolls where they were behind. The government went to the last election as a consequence with no clear idea of what it stood for, no clear vision of what it wanted to achieve. What has happened to jobs and growth? It is something we haven't heard about for quite some months. Without a defining mission, the government has been completely unable to define its policy agenda. The vacuum has led to these countless little groups pulling one another apart in public.

Here are some questions that the government would not be able to answer in one voice. Does the government believe that coal-fired power plants should be subsidised by the state, if the market is unwilling to build them? Even in this chamber, we couldn't get a single voice. There is no clear vision and no clear energy policy. Are renewables an important part of Australia's energy future? Minister Frydenberg might say yes. Senator Canavan would certainly say no. Is climate change even real? Even without Senator Roberts, there are plenty of doubting voices in this chamber—people who are unwilling to accept the science and unwilling to accept the government's commitments to reduce our emissions.

On social policy, we don't even really need to talk about this in any detail, because we just have to look at the Hansard for the last three days of debate in this chamber. Does the government support multiculturalism? The willingness to cosy up to One Nation suggests that, for parts of the coalition party room, the answer is no. On economic policy: how will you reduce the deficit? Are individual tax cuts or corporate tax cuts more important? Should penalty rates have been cut? What about the government's supposed decentralisation agenda? This is one that's quite interesting, isn't it? Should government departments be moved only on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, some kind of sensible economic decision, or should we just do it whenever members of the Nationals really, really want them in their electorate? On the banking royal commission—this is a pretty simple question, you would think: should there even be one? Is a royal commission just a lawyer's picnic? If so, why did this government initiate not one but two of them on political grounds? These are not small questions. They go to the heart of issues that have been on the public agenda this year. The problem is that those on the other side are entirely unable to answer them and entirely unable to act on them. Mr Turnbull is the captain of a rudderless ship, without a destination and with a mutinous crew.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What the Australian people have once again witnessed by the motion to take note of answers moved by the Australian Labor Party is their absolute desire to play politics. What it also tells us, very interestingly, is that the Australian Labor Party, in fact, does not believe in diversity. Just towards the end, the good senator told us that everything had to be in one voice. It reminds me of that very sage observation made about the Australian Labor Party caucus that they were 'like lobotomised zombies'—a description by somebody who is actually part of the Labor caucus, one Senator Doug Cameron.

What you get in the Labor Party is the cookie-cutter trade union officials who get rolled into the caucus room and told: 'You will all vote one way. You will all say one thing,' whereas we in the coalition actually celebrate diversity of views. We actually believe that having a contest of ideas sharpens public policy. It allows you to learn from each other and ensure that you come to the best landing possible. But when everybody is a 'lobotomised zombie', just saying what the leadership or somebody else at trade union headquarters tells them to, you do not get the best of public policy.

But why is there this affected motion today? I think we know why. The Australian Labor Party, in the midst of their leadership group, have an issue that they don't want to talk about. It is an issue created, yet again, by the hapless Senator Dastyari, who took money from Chinese donors not for the Labor Party but to trouser it for himself, for his own pocket, to pay his personal debts. You ask the question: how is it that a Labor senator could do something like that? I would suggest to you that it is a lack of moral judgement.

That aside, today the hapless Senator Dastyari—part of the Australian Labor Party leadership group—is in the media yet again in relation to allegedly alerting a Chinese person to the fact that his phone might be bugged. I would invite those listening in to consider not what I say in relation to the very serious nature of this but what the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, has to say about this. He said, 'The allegation's that an Australian politician'—insert Senator Sam Dastyari, Labor senator for New South Wales—'advised a Chinese national that they were subject to intelligence scrutiny from Australian or allied agencies, and, to me, that's about as serious as it gets.'

This now has to be investigated in a very public way and, from that investigation, we will see what the consequences are. Frankly, the manner in which the conversation was reported to have taken place is enormously concerning. We've got to urgently get to the bottom of this to understand the facts. That is the issue of the day. This is the seriousness of the Australian Labor Party's incapacity to form the government of this country, because in its leadership group it has people such as Senator Sam Dastyari, who is willing to behave in a manner that the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, has said is a matter of very grave concern. So e know why Labor has moved this motion. It is an attempt to shift the public focus. Clean up your own mess with Senator Dastyari before you seek to throw stones at the government.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Labor Party doesn't need to advise the Australian people to have the clarity of vision that they have about the disunity that is characteristic of this government—the chaos of this government. There are people sitting here in the chamber today who aren't able to go to the green place because nobody's there. Nobody's there because this government is running from itself. It's eating itself alive, and it didn't want to put on a show in the green house, so it just decided not to show up. Three words: chaos, dysfunction and disunity. Those are the hallmarks of the Turnbull government.

With the Labor Party, we are fighting for the things that Australians need. We are fighting to protect penalty rates for workers. We are fighting to restore funding to schools and ensure funding is needs based, instead of having the $17 billion cut that this divided government wants to deliver—or has, in fact, delivered. We're fighting to make housing more affordable, fighting to ensure a fairer taxation system and fighting to make sure that young Australians and people who want to retrain don't have to go to university and be saddled with the albatross of a $100,000 debt around their neck. That is what they're trying to push through this place. That's the kind of government they are, and they don't want people to see it.

While they're doing all of this malicious damage to the nation of Australia and our social fabric, the Turnbull government is entertaining itself with massive internal fights. The disunity has become clearer every single day, and in the past fortnight it's been absolutely clear for the whole of the country to see. Mr Turnbull, the Prime Minister, has completely lost his authority. He's lost the confidence of his party and he has certainly lost the confidence of the Australian people. But you don't need to take my word for it; just look at the Prime Minister's actions, which reveal what's really going on. Everyone else, including even in his own disunified party, was ready to show up, but Mr Turnbull makes a call, a captain's pick of his own kind. Why? Because he is absolutely running scared of his own backroom.

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He's a jelly-back.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He is a jelly-back indeed, Senator Cameron—one of your more colourful phrases and well used in this context when we're trying to describe this lily-livered, jelly-back Prime Minister.

This isn't something that's just happening here in the bubble of Canberra, though. The disunity of the Turnbull government is having a real and tangible impact on the lives of Australian men and women. Instead of being here at work debating 53 bills before the lower house, including legislation on a response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Prime Minister decided not to show up this week, because he is scared of what's going on behind him. He knows that he knifed a first-term sitting prime minister and he knows they're all lining up behind him as he's falling over as we speak. The actions of Mr Turnbull are a clear reflection of the arrogance, of the born-to-rule attitude that we see from this government. What kind of message does this cancelling of parliament send to young children? If you're uncertain, you just run and hide.

This cancelling of the House of Representatives is just one revelation of the state of disunity that so disables this dysfunctional government. It seems like every day we have a new report of a different flavour of disunity. It is like a menu; you can choose your flavour every day of the week. It's the disunity of an MP telling the media he or she is threatening to quit the coalition unless Malcolm Turnbull makes a change or is dumped. Or it's the disunity of the same MP talking to the Australian Conservatives about whether he might jump ship to join Mr Bernardi's party. We know what that sort of discussion does to a government. Or it's the other flavours of disunity: cabinet leaks. There is not just one; you can have that in two flavours. There is the disunity of MPs and senators coming forward, no longer anonymously, actually talking on the public record about how terrible Malcolm Turnbull is as a leader. Just today George Christensen said that Mr Turnbull is having a hands-off approach and is not a true leader. If you've got somebody on your own side describing you as that, you're in big, big trouble.

Mr Turnbull is not fit to govern, and his incapacity is seen by those who are closest to him: those who are sharing the government benches here in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. They know him. They're saying he's not a leader. They're saying he's unfit. They're divided and they are showing all the signs of disunity, of a dysfunctional government, because Malcolm Turnbull is an unfit man to be the Prime Minister. (Time expired)

Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remind you please to refer to MPs in the other place by their correct titles.

Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I speak on the substantive issue, I reassure everyone who is in the gallery that you are watching the better house of parliament!

We're talking about leadership. We are talking about leadership of political parties. If the Labor Party, those opposite, want to talk about leadership then they should glance over their shoulder at their colleagues next door to them and at their own leader, because they've got a real failure of leadership in their own ranks. The Fairfax papers reported this morning that one of their Senate leaders, Senator Dastyari:

… warned Chinese Communist Party-linked political donor Huang Xiangmo last year that his phone was likely tapped by government agencies …

and also that:

Mr Dastyari gave Mr Huang counter-surveillance advice, saying they should leave their phones inside and go outside to speak.

This isn't the first time we have seen conduct of this sort from Senator Dastyari.

Last year, I believe it was, he was demoted to the backbench following, as my colleague Senator Abetz pointed out, his taking of a donation to pay off a travel debt in certainly a way that the Labor Party itself decided was not particularly seemly. Subsequent to that, though, Senator Dastyari was promoted back to a leadership role in the Senate. Once again, we have a significant and grave accusation—yes, it is only an accusation at the moment—against Senator Dastyari. My colleagues opposite, throughout question time, when the Attorney-General was answering questions in this area, continued to interject, 'Tell us what happened.' Well, I'd suggest they ask their colleague. Why don't they just ask Senator Dastyari what happened? Did it happen? Did he talk to the donor, this political donor, in this way? If so, what did he say to him?

I think it's very important when we're talking about leadership that we also consider the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition—someone who has got some significant question marks over issues of donations himself and someone who, as a union leader, traded away the terms and conditions of some of the lowest-paid workers in Australia. I would also focus on leadership in terms of what this government is doing and what this government is achieving. What has this government done? What has this government achieved? This government has delivered strong economic leadership by growing the economy, creating jobs, keeping unemployment low. More than 355,000 Australians are in a job than just 12 months ago. Those jobs are obviously, in the main, from the private sector. Government doesn't create jobs but it certainly enables the private sector to lift people up and to give them the jobs that provide such dignity in our society.

We on this side have delivered a National Energy Guarantee. There is much work to be done but this will, when it is implemented, cut power bills by hundreds of dollars a year and, for the first time, guarantee reliability. We are taking action to put further downward pressure on energy prices. We have delivered the biggest reform to school funding by a Commonwealth government in our nation's history, investing $37 billion-plus in child care and early learning over four years and we have made changes to the industrial relationship system, bringing back the ABCC to ensure that 300,000 small businesses and one million employees in the construction industry cannot be bullied by the unions. We are keeping Australia safe by ensuring that our law enforcement and security agencies have the powers they need. We have put in place a national gun amnesty that has taken 50,000 firearms out of circulation and off the streets. We have a naval shipbuilding plan. I was very pleased to be part of a significant announcement in Perth and also a significant announcement with the Minister for Defence at the Stirling naval base just a few weeks ago. This government is doing a lot. Leadership is about getting things done, and Prime Minister Turnbull is getting things done. (Time expired)

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

I join with many other speakers in really acknowledging that today we probably have seen this parliament at its best. After a long and rancorous debate about the topic of marriage equality in our country, we have seen politicians from all sides of the political spectrum come through and finally deliver what the Australian people have wanted for a very long time, which is the right for same-sex couples to be married just as that right has applied to heterosexual couples for as long as anyone can remember. Obviously the achievement in moving that legislation to grant same-sex marriage is historic in its own right, but the other thing that was really on display over the course of that debate and that vote was the power that comes from unity. We did have politicians from the Labor side, the Liberal side, the Nationals side and the minor parties. Obviously, not everyone voted that way, but it was one of those rare occasions in this parliament where you do have some level of bipartisan agreement to deliver some really important reform that will benefit many, many people into the future.

In listening to the concluding speech by Senator Smith, the Liberal senator from Western Australia, one of the points I took from it was his comments that he really noted that that spirit of unity and generosity is something that we could see a lot more of in this parliament. It makes you wonder what is possible in that sort of environment, because amazing things really are possible when you have unity in the political process. But, sadly, that sense of unity is something that is in very short supply in this government. Not a day goes by where we don't see backbenchers in this government—in some cases even ministers—making comments which express a lack of confidence in this Prime Minister and a lack of confidence in this government's direction. All in all, they display incredible levels of disunity.

We've had Senator O'Sullivan doing it about banking royal commissions. We've had Senator Macdonald doing interviews yesterday, effectively, saying the Prime Minister's lost the plot and is not resonating with people in northern and central Queensland. There is the unnamed member of parliament who has said that they're going to leave the coalition ranks before the end of the year if the Prime Minister isn't replaced—the list goes on.

In listening to Senator Abetz's contribution, he tried to pass this off as the diversity that is on offer in the government ranks—and I have to say, sitting on this side of the chamber and looking at the government ranks, I can't see a lot of diversity. He says that the disunity we see on a daily basis from government senators and MPs is all about diversity and that we should celebrate diversity. As an observer of this government, both in question time today and each and every day, I can say there don't seem to be a whole lot of celebrations going on over there. People are demoralised and distracted, and that fundamentally gets back to the division and disunity that we see constantly from this government.

This government is truly racked by disunity. It actually doesn't give me any pleasure to watch that. We see government MPs and government senators suffering. You can see the anguish on their faces as they turn up here every day, knowing that they are part of a government that is distracted, lacking unity and purpose. However, I don't really care that much about how government MPs and government senators feel. I don't really mind too much about their anguish, but I care very deeply about the fact that the Australian people are suffering from the lack of unity and division that we see constantly from this government, because it's not as if this country isn't without really significant challenges that they are turning to their government to solve. Unfortunately, this government is so distracted by disunity and division that it is completely unable to focus on the significant challenges facing our country and get on and solve them. The challenges include jobs. We know that right across the country, particularly in regional Queensland, there is a desperate and urgent need for new jobs and a government that has some plans about what we can do to get new jobs. But, instead, this government is so distracted by its division that it can't even get one project approved for Queensland in its Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. That is just one example. It's the same on health, on wages growth and on infrastructure. This government is divided.

Question agreed to.