Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance: Australians know all too well the failure of this government to do their job. The only job they want to do is to do a job on one another, and we saw about 10 minutes ago breaking news from Channel 10 that the Prime Minister is about to do a job on one of his ministers. Whatever happened to the party of, 'If you have a go, you get a go'? After three years of this Prime Minister, we've gone from, 'If you have a go, you get a go', to, now, 'We have a job to do; I'm going to do mine and I need you to do yours.' Inspiring stuff! It's a bit like the slogan in Futurama, 'You gotta do what you gotta do.'

We went from Tony Abbott, who—when he realised that things weren't going well for him—said, 'Good government starts today,' to Malcolm Turnbull, who promised stable government about three years into his term. And now the Prime Minister is promising to 'do his job'. Wouldn't it be nice if he had realised that he had a job to do at the start of this pandemic, rather than when we are two and a bit years in, if he'd started doing his job when people were telling him there was a crisis in aged care, if he'd started doing his job when people—including trade unions—were telling him to order rapid antigen tests or if he had done his job when people from Pfizer were saying, 'We'd like to speak to you about getting vaccinations for the people in your country.' If only he had done his job. I'm worried that we are going to repeat mistakes again and again under this government.

We saw the strategy from this Prime Minister where, every time something went wrong, he would blame the states. And then we saw in question time today the new strategy: blame the nation-states. When he was asked about the increasing cost of beef in Australia, he blamed it on the situation in Ukraine! Let's blame the nation-states. We know he likes to attack states—he has attacked the great state of Queensland many times and he attacks the great state of Western Australia on a regular basis. We've seen a number of times that he wants to attack Western Australia, so much so that he even wrote a cheque to cover Clive Palmer 's court costs.

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