Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw that comment. But, more interesting perhaps, were the more sober comments from the former, very successful Labor minister who contributed significantly to Australia—former Minister Button—when he said that factional leaders of the Labor Party have lost touch with mainstream people and the working class. Of course they have. They are overrun by people who are not representative of their communities. They are overrun by people who were put there by factional leaders and by unions that represent ever-diminishing proportions of the Australian population. What did former Minister Button say? He called these factional leaders ‘control freaks devoted to manipulation rather than thought’. He said:

Those who make it through to parliamentary positions seldom have much impact—as public figures they’re about as attractive as Hannibal Lecter.

That was the former Labor minister John Button. He said that because he had Australia’s national interest in sight.

We have a problem. The opposition is crippled in its ability to be an operational opposition. We see that Mr Beazley’s approval rating is only 34 per cent in terms of who would make a better Prime Minister. The reason for that is that he is a reflection of the statement that his father made. As Kim Beazley Sr said, the Labor Party was once full of the cream of the working class but in modern times it is full of the dregs of the middle class.

We see these unrepresentative people. We had during question time an interesting exchange and criticism—it was an attempt to denigrate and blacken the good name of Pru Goward because she is standing for Liberal preselection. So what did the so-called feminists in the Labor Party, who are supposed to represent all women, do? They are very selective. They do not really perform as part of an operational opposition because, if you get selected as part of a quota, you are a token. When you come to this place, you must expect those who did the hard yards, who were selected on merit, to treat you as a token. The member for Gellibrand was asked in an interview:

You got there through the quota system. Would you have got in without that?

She said:

I don’t think that would have happened without having our rules in place, and I think that that has been a really significant change within the party.

Indeed, it has been a significant change but certainly not a change for the better.

The Labor Party are so desperate for relevance they cannot even bring themselves—this is how bad it is on the other side—to use the words ‘mainstream Australia’ in caucus because of all the lunatics within their extreme left-wing faction. The member for Grayndler said, ‘Sometimes it’s time to move on with regard to leadership.’ What do the opposition do? They know they are down in the polls. The member for Lalor looks very depressed. The opposition spokesman for foreign affairs is down in the dumps. They know these figures are bad, but where do they move onto? We could not have the member for Lalor being the Leader of the Opposition. The right-wing faction in Victoria would not let her, and good on them. They could not let someone who was so unrepresentative and so left wing ever be leader of the main opposition party in Australia. So, for the moment, they are stuck with the current opposition leader, Mr Kim Beazley.

The member for Grayndler, after all, would know a thing or two about putting political interests ahead of national interest. He was the fellow, as Labor’s environment spokesman, who was prepared to trade away Australia’s jobs and risk losing millions of dollars in investment by signing the Kyoto protocol. How was this supposed to be in the national interest? He supported Bracks’s disgraceful plan in condemning our proud history of alpine grazing in Victoria and consigned it to the dustbin. (Time expired)

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