Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here I am, colleagues, with five minutes of unlooked-for opportunity to reflect upon the conduct of the Senate this week. I'm not sure what was funnier: Senator Babet's predictably weird contribution on modern Australian politics from the internet fringes or Senator Ciccone's 'egg-cellent' contribution about the very important contribution that egg production makes to the Australian chicken industry—no 'poultry' contribution at all! It is not a 'yolking' matter, the contribution that egg production makes for us.

The standing orders often try and restrain me from doing things, but I respect the standing orders, and I won't make a contribution about the two pieces of legislation that are before the Senate and the Australian parliament this week—the Future Made in Australia legislation and the Help to Buy legislation. I won't make a contribution about those two pieces of legislation except to say that it is the increasing pattern of this place that bills that are in the national interest are delayed and defied by a coalition that we see emerging here of the Greens political party and the Liberal and National parties.

There are genuine Australian progressives frustrated by what's happening in the world and concerned for the environment who voted for the Australian Greens in the Senate. That's their democratic right in our system. What they didn't realise was that, when they voted for the Greens, they got Peter Dutton. That's the result, now, of voting for the Greens political party. You vote for the Greens; you get Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce. There are well-meaning conservatives who can't break the habit of a lifetime and who have been voting Liberal or National their whole lives.

Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Good people!

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They're good people, Senator Cadell, who are just starting to figure out that, when you vote Liberal or National, you get Adam Bandt and Senator Faruqi and Senator McKim and Senator Waters. That's what you get. There is an army of Greens members of parliament in the other place who are only there for one reason: Mr Dutton and the Queensland LNP decided they would make sure that they got there.

For people who vote Liberal or National, it's even worse. They've got Peter Dutton, the most extreme right-wing leader of the Liberal Party in Australian political history, a party that has drifted so far from its economic, moral and political philosophy that it is dominated by an increasingly extreme, increasingly influential and increasingly spooky and weird backbench. I'm not looking at anybody in particular, Senator Antic. It's an opposition that hasn't come to grips with opposition. It hasn't come to grips with the defeat that it incurred in the last election, hasn't learned from that defeat and is continuing as 'Morrison's leftovers'. (Time expired)

Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 1.30 pm, we will now proceed to two-minute statements.