Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very grateful to the member for Chifley for raising this matter of public importance in the parliament today because, after a very long parliamentary session, we have found it very difficult to find a matter of public importance raised by the other side. It falls to Labor and this side of the House to talk about the issues that are important to the Australian people, that should be debated in this parliament. The Leader of the House demonstrated forcefully today the number of hours that have been wasted by those opposite on spurious suspensions of standing orders so that the Leader of the Opposition could get up, day-in and day-out, and sometimes twice a day, to raise his stunts, to absolutely no effect—wasting the time of the parliament. If you want to talk about waste of taxpayers' dollars, just think about the amount of waste that has been caused by the Leader of the Opposition and the Manager of Opposition Business in the House coming in here day after day, wasting important parliamentary time, suspending standing orders and preventing us from talking about the issues that really are the matters of public importance in this House. So I am very grateful to my friend the member for Chifley for raising this matter of public importance—ensuring that we have fiscal responsibility as we approach the 2012-13 budget.

While the opposition is spending their time on stunts, the government is getting on with the important business of government. If there were a week in this parliamentary schedule when that could not have been more clear it is the week we have just gone through. The government has introduced and seen through this parliament some spectacularly important legislation, all of it opposed by those opposite because it is in their DNA is to say no to everything.

They said no to safe rates. They said no to ensuring that, when we and our families and friends get in our cars and share the roads with heavy vehicles, we have a safe motoring and a safe trucking industry. They say they cannot see the link between the number of hours a truck driver has to spend on the road and how safe the working conditions are for that truck driver. They beggar belief. That legislation was supported by this side of the House and all right-thinking Australians but was opposed by those opposite. We saw introduced into the House this week important maritime legislation. There, in the 11 years of government—

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