Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 and follow the member for Lindsay, who I do acknowledge is one of the more thoughtful members on the other side. It is pleasing to see the member for Lindsay speaking from some notes but without a written speech, which is an unusual event for those on the other side, and I congratulate him for doing so. He did a reasonable job in defending what is very difficult legislation to defend. The member for Lindsay is right: the opposition will support these bills, as has been the history in this place of supporting appropriation bills, except for some time ago when a famous one was not supported.

I thought the speech of the shadow minister, the member for Dunkley, was a cracker in the sense that it very much highlighted the problem with this government that it does not think through the consequences of its policies; it does not think through the policies it is implementing. We have seen this across a wide variety of issues, such as the home insulation of pink batts from China policy; the water policy, which is particularly pertinent to my electorate and is a very important issue in my part of the world; and the disaster which is the Julia Gillard memorial halls project, the $17 billion that has been thrown out of the window at a rate of knots. We saw another good example last week on the front page of the—

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