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

The opposition has moved this motion about whether the Speaker's use of her Parliament House dining room for Liberal Party fundraisers constitutes an improper interference with the operations of the House of Representatives. The first point the government would make is that we will not be supporting this motion under any circumstances. The reason we will not be supporting this motion is that this is a motion about smear and innuendo directed at the Speaker's office. Smear and innuendo are the Labor Party's first weapon of choice; it always has been and continues to be so. Smarting from their election defeat last September, from the moment that you were elected, Madam Speaker, the Labor Party has been trying to smear you, denigrate you and traduce you in the chair. On the very first day, the Manager of Opposition Business called you a witch, Madam Speaker. And here we are today debating the latest in the series of attempts to denigrate you as Speaker. Our opinion, on the government side of the House, is that you are upholding the role of Speaker with dignity, decorum and intelligence, as we expected when we elected you last year, Madam Speaker.

Since you have been elected Speaker, Madam Speaker, the opposition have moved dissent motions. If my memory serves me correctly, they moved a dissent motion the first day that you were appointed Speaker. It was one of many dissent motions. They moved a no-confidence motion against you at the end of the last sitting of parliament and now, on the flimsiest of pretexts, the Labor Party has moved a motion accusing you of misusing your position as Speaker because you held a dinner in the Speaker's dining rooms. As you pointed out, Madam Speaker, fundraisers occur in this building all the time. And as long as those fundraisers are paid for either personally or by the political party that a member represents, they in no way breach any rules of this parliament. And so instead of simply accepting that there are no rules breached—and you commented on this, Madam Speaker, this morning—the Labor Party has come into the chamber this afternoon and moved a motion that is clearly designed to smear the position of Speaker and to do another political stunt—in this case, to play the woman not the ball.

We are not going to be lectured by the party of the member for Watson, who was exposed today on the front page of the Telegraph as having advocated for Mr Nweke, a convicted drug smuggler. This is also the party that suborned the former member for Fisher, Peter Slipper, into selling the past and effectively joining the government by taking the Speaker's role in the last parliament, pushing Harry Jenkins, the former member for Scullin, out of the seat in order to gain one vote. This was the brilliant idea of the former Leader of the House, the member for Grayndler. In a sheer act of genius, they would, in one fell swoop, gain a vote on the floor of the parliament by bringing Harry Jenkins back to their side of the chamber and moving a member from our side of the chamber into the Speaker's chair. Unfortunately, that did not go quite as well as the then government hoped. So we are not going to be lectured by the party of Peter Slipper; we are not going to be lectured by the party of the member for Watson. That is not to even go into the stories that have come out of ICAC involving the Obeid family, Joe Tripodi, Ian Macdonald and many others over the last several years.

All of this is designed to distract the media and the public from the fact that the Labor Party has a complete paucity of policy or understanding of what is needed to be done in opposition. The Labor Party has not yet finished the grieving process of losing the election in September last year. I can understand that after six years they were shocked to have been such an incompetent and terrible government that they ended up back on the opposition benches rather than on the government benches. What they need to do now in opposition is accept defeat. They need to accept that the carbon tax is rejected and allow it to be repealed by the incoming government. They have to start developing the policy that will help them to perhaps regain the government benches over the years ahead. All of these kinds of political stunts, all of these attempts to smear the Speaker, to make the Speaker an object of political football are all designed to distract from the fact that the opposition has no explanation for the debt and deficit disaster that they left the incoming government after September last year. So every day we will hear every other issue other than an explanation for why they were so incompetent that they were unable to leave to the new incoming government the same economic conditions that the Howard and Costello government left to the Rudd government when it came into power in 2007.

The reason we will not support this motion is that the government is going to join in a political stunt that distracts people from Labor's paucity of ideas, from their inability to deal with their own grief having lost last year's election. We will not join in a political stunt designed to smear the Speaker and the Speaker's office. Therefore, the government will not support this motion. I think I have spoken long enough because I think the time of the House is better spent on government business. On that note, I move: that the motion be put.

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