Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, your office is an invidious one. When you are sitting in the chair, I think that it is truly one against 149. But, in talking about parliamentary standards, I do not think that we should be dwelling on the actions that you take from the chair; we should be looking at the way in which members behave within the chamber. I want particularly to look at the events of this week within the chamber and at the way in which the use of the advantage the government has under the standing orders is being abused by those opposite.

The headline in this morning’s Canberra Times is ‘Abbott drugs slur raises Opposition’s anger’. The headline in today’s Sydney Morning Herald is ‘Trouble in the House as Abbott the stirrer strikes again’. If we look at the dorothy dix question given to the Minister for Health and Ageing yesterday, we get an understanding of what is wrong with this place. As I have said to you before, Mr Speaker, the fact that we have something like nine or 10 standing orders about questions—two pages of the standing orders—and one standing order, standing order 104, which speaks about the relevance of the answers, shows that it is not a level playing field. There are great advantages for those on the other side, not just because they are the government but because of the way in which the standing orders operate and the use of the standing orders to avoid proper accountability.

The question yesterday, which was obviously driven by some focus group or Mark Textor polling, was about drug policy. The only intention of the Minister for Health and Ageing was to accuse the opposition of being soft on drugs. Of course that made the opposition angry, because that is a nonsense. There may be differences in the way we wish to achieve the battle against the drug problem, but to indicate that differing views mean that one side or the other is soft on drugs is a nonsense. Furthermore, in his answer, in supporting the contention that the Leader of the Opposition surrenders to the premiers over heroin injecting rooms, along the way the minister said that the Leader of the Opposition surrendered to the Islamists over Iraq. What sort of answer is that if not provocative? During question time the government, this executive, uses the great advantage that the standing orders give to debate issues and to provide answers which not only put their own case but fit the opposition with the case it believes should fit.

In one of these newspaper articles there is a quote of I think an unrecorded interjection from one of my colleagues along the lines of ‘Show some leadership, Hawker’. I have to say to that colleague of mine in the Labor Party that he is wrong. It is not about the Speaker showing leadership. If it is an action of the Minister for Health and Ageing, there is one person in this chamber who has to show leadership and that is the Prime Minister. This is a Prime Minister who, when elected to that high office, said that he intended to raise the parliamentary standards in this chamber. What has happened? On every criterion, standards continue to drop—the way we have seen question time operate over the last couple of sitting weeks, the lack of answers and responses to committee reports and the lack of answers to questions on notice. Truly, if we were to look at the way in which this government treated the parliament, we would have to say that we are going backwards. There are so many important things that come before this parliament that really need and require ministerial statements. But the attitude is: ‘Oh, no, don’t do that; use up a question. Get only one side of the argument. Fit the opposition if it feels right. Use the terminology that the focus groups, Textor and the polling show should be used.’

If standards are to be improved in this place, there has to be goodwill—I acknowledge goodwill on both sides—but the last few weeks have shown that the government are not going to do anything to try to improve parliamentary standards. In fact, they are cranking things up because they believe that there is a political advantage in blowing this place up. I do not think that is correct. If they were truly looking at parliamentary standards, they would send to the Procedure Committee a reference to look at question time—to have it as a proper question time instead of one side asking a question and the other side debating the issue. That is wrong, and it needs correcting. (Time expired)