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

What do you think the link is there? Why mightn't they want someone to closely examine the water buybacks that have been undertaken under this government, now that we have this Deputy Prime Minister, the bloke who'll sit in this chair at lunchtime? What do you reckon? I reckon there's another member as well, the member for Hume, who might be a bit interested in whether this gets a close examination or not.

The fact is that this is a government that doesn't have integrity. This is a government that is all about itself. We've seen it this week when, in the middle of a pandemic, they have prioritised stabbing rather than jabbing. They've prioritised stabbing a Deputy Prime Minister, a man of integrity, a man who doesn't have question marks over his buybacks and his personal involvement in these issues—a man whom, whilst I have substantial policy disagreements with him, there is no cloud over. You can't say that about his colleagues.

Opposition members interjecting—

You can't say that, can you? Their priority was to get rid of him and then to immediately flex their muscles and say: 'We're not really a part of the coalition. We don't care about South Australia. We don't care about proper use of water to maximise agricultural outputs whilst ensuring environmental sustainability. We don't care about having a national integrity commission. We're showing once again that we're just focused on ourselves.'

That's the problem for this mob opposite. They've been there for almost a decade now, for the best part of a decade, and they'll be asking for even more time. They are without a plan for the future—just a plan to wreck, not a plan to actually deal with the current challenge of COVID-19, let alone a plan to recover stronger. This has been a debacle of a final sitting week, a debacle that began with the stabbing of a man of integrity and his replacement with the bloke who has presided over this attack on a key part of our agriculture and water policy in this country.

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