Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

It goes to the debate of issues, which is the same as the question and the supplementary question asked by the Leader of the Opposition.

We know that the Leader of the Opposition did not consult his frontbench on the stunt that he suggested yesterday. Indeed, he would have been the only person in the parliament if he had been here at 10 am yesterday. The fact is that this bill is just another stunt. It still has not been introduced into the Senate and there has been no debate about it in the House of Representatives, because so lacking in detail are the opposition that they could not even get their act together to put the bill on notice last Thursday.

We know that true conservatives have rejected this approach. True conservatives, who have respect for parliamentary institutions, have rejected it. Indeed, John Howard—and the Leader of the Opposition has described himself as the 'political love child' of John Howard and the raiser of the point of order, Bronwyn Bishop—had this to say:

… in any one year you could have 40 or 50 contentious issues and the only way that democracy can work in an orderly fashion is to have the sort of electoral process we have. … I don’t think you can run it any other way.

Rejected. The idea is rejected by some of those opposite and it is rejected by the member for New England, who said that it was just another political stunt. It is rejected by Senator Fielding, who said today, 'It is a political stunt.' But that is all we see day after day after day in this parliament—no respect for parliamentary institutions. The Leader of the Opposition has robbed parliament of some 124 questions by his suspensions of standing orders, and in about half an hour we will probably have yet another suspension of standing orders. But, as the Leader of the Opposition put it himself on 21 June 2006:

Disrupting the House is not a sign of a disciplined opposition; disrupting the House is a sign of a desperate opposition.

Well, he got that right, because what we are living through is the longest dummy spit in Australian political history. (Time expired)

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