Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, we felt that the gold medal for hypocrisy in this place was going to go to the member for Sturt. We thought he was a deadset winner. This guy is the Liberal Party's one-man answer to GetUp! because he said the land speed record in rushing from the cabinet meeting where he stuck his hand in the air and voted for the cuts to the ABC and then rushed back to his electorate to put out a petition against his own government, his own cabinet saying, 'You can cut anywhere you like, but keep the cuts out of my electorate.'

Since that extraordinary display of cabinet solidarity, we have seen an absolute conga line of coalition MPs who have stood up and said these cuts to the ABC, particularly in regional Australia, are an absolute outrage. The problem for them is that they have shown, once again, that those in the coalition are lions in their electorate but they are absolute lambs when they come here to Canberra. One such lamb is the member for Gilmore, Ms Ann Sudmalis, who has written this breathless letter to the CEO of the ABC, calling the cuts and the closure of the ABC's Nowra office absolutely deplorable. Well, I have got a proposition for the member for Gilmore: you can barrack for the fire, or you can barrack for the fire brigade. You cannot do both, or you will end up burning yourself.