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

You've got to worry when you can't make the National Party front bench. In terms of the parliament, we will not be opposing the drought fund. We will be in government once again committed to restructuring Infrastructure Australia and making it a strong body once again by having a genuinely independent board of experts, making sure that it can do its job in driving microeconomic reform and having proper cost-benefit analysis and rigour in terms of infrastructure. We will establish in the future a fund like the Building Australia Fund because we think it is essential that there be a funding component.

Tonight, those opposite show once again that they're the wreckers. When they talk about genuine economic reform, they are in their third term and they are struggling with the question: what are the big reforms that they have made? Yes, they got rid of a climate change policy that we had, but they haven't got one for themselves. On economic policy, yes, some tax cuts have got through, but there's no tax reform. Tax reform is what the Hawke and Keating government did. John Howard's government, to be fair, brought about some tax reform. What they've done is some tax cuts, which is very different from economic reform. On the skills agenda, what have they done? Nothing whatsoever. We've seen a decline in Australia's position. In terms of our engagement with the world, where are we? We're an embarrassment on so many indicators. When it comes to action on drought and water policy, of course we have in this country an absolute crisis going on in the Murray-Darling Basin, and this government thinks that a bill with $100 million 12 months from now is all that they need to do. When it comes to the forward-looking agenda, they simply don't have one. They have arrogance. They have hubris. They don't have an agenda. That is why they try to define everything as being about us. When we raised today, in the first question of parliament, the Prime Minister's comments about the fact that we've supported the unanimous recommendations of the joint committee that looks at national security issues, the Prime Minister dismissed that again. It's all politics.

What Australians have is conflict fatigue. They are looking for solutions, not arguments. This is a government that is obsessed by arguments. It is obsessed by arguments with itself. That is why they are unable to actually move forward with a forward-looking agenda. We, on this side, will continue to hold the government to account, but we will also be developing a forward-looking agenda to meet the challenges that are there, going forward as a nation. One of those challenges is drought. You can't deal with that without dealing with climate change. You can't deal with that without having a sound environmental policy. You can't deal with that without having rigour and transparency around funding mechanisms.

This bill has been improved from the original bill because of the amendments that were moved by the former member for Indi. That's why you have proper parliamentary procedure. It's so you actually have analysis and you improve legislation. That's why this government's position, in ramming this through tonight without proper scrutiny and debate, is such an outrage. I say to the government: its performance on the procedures tonight has brought no credit to it and no credit to this parliament. The government really needs to consider the consequences of the way that it has behaved before this parliament. That is particularly given the context whereby I declared, as Leader of the Labor Party both publicly and in discussions with the government, that we were supportive of the drought fund. Under those circumstances, the government's behaviour is nothing less than bizarre.

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