Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

That is right, Mr Speaker. You are correct. Precedence should be given to this motion. I am explaining why this motion is more important than any other business before the House. It is because, in the words of Oliver Cromwell 359 years ago, which apply as much to this government today as they then did, 'You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.' That is what the Australian people want this government to do—go.

The proposed censure motion is the most pressing matter before the House and for that reason standing orders must be suspended to facilitate this debate, because this Prime Minister has traduced and debased the office. She should no longer be tolerated by her party. The Prime Minister came to the office steeped in deceit. Laurie Oakes first exposed it at the National Press Club the week before the election when he asked her if it were true that she had done a deal with the former Prime Minister to leave him in office while her henchmen rounded up the numbers. We had the pitiful story of the Leader of the House breaking into the room where the now foreign minister but then Prime Minister was sitting and saying, 'She's doing you over. Don't you know what's going on?' The poor former Prime Minister said to the Leader of the House, 'Don't worry, mate. We've done a deal. It's all right,' and the Leader of the House said, 'No, she is doing you in.'

The reason standing orders should be suspended and this matter should be given precedence is that the information continues to roll out about the dysfunction and the division at the centre of this government, and the soft underbelly of the Prime Minister's alibis and stories about how she came to leadership were exposed dramatically on the Four Corners program on Monday night. We now know that her office was drafting a victory speech two weeks before the leadership change. We know that the ambassador to the United States was called in by the Secretary of State two weeks before the event to ask if things would change under the new leadership, and we know that the Prime Minister in the two weeks before she became the Prime Minister was using secret UMR polling to convince her colleagues that the leadership should be changed. But, incredibly, we are supposed to believe that on the day of the challenge this all came as a complete surprise to the Prime Minister. Standing orders should be suspended and this matter should be given precedence because the Prime Minister gained her office through disloyalty and deceit, and she is going to lose it the same way. The Prime Minister presides over three Labor Parties: the Gillard party, the Rudd party and the anyone else party. Whoever emerges as leader, the blood feud will not end. We know that this week the Minister for Trade has been visiting office after office with a list of numbers, trying to show members that the Minister for Foreign Affairs has no more than 30 votes—on behalf of Bill Ludwig, the union leader from Queensland. The Rudd camp, of course, have been calling him the equivalent of 'Chemical Ali', from the days of the Iraq War.

So dysfunctional are they that standing orders should be suspended and this motion should be given precedence, so the Prime Minister can defend herself from the charge that her leadership was infected from the beginning and that the Labor Party, like dealing with a gangrenous wound, is now moving to excise the sick limb. This is the Prime Minister who has built her leadership on deceit and deception—the citizens' assembly, gambling reform, means-testing the private health insurance rebate, the East Timor processing centre, hospital reform, cash for clunkers, the open and transparent government, and, the jackpot of all of them, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.'

So of course this matter should be given precedence over all the matters on the agenda today. Standing orders should be suspended because the full hideousness of how much the Prime Minister has debauched her office can be seen in her handling of the controversy surrounding the member for Dobell and the cover-up of the role of her office in the Australia Day riots. In both matters, she has been evasive, shifty and malevolent, to use the words of John McTernan, her new head of communications, about the three things she should not be. The Prime Minister has been asked 36 questions about the Fair Work Australia investigation and 18 questions about the role of her office in the Australia Day riot. It is a matter of record that she has answered none of them.

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