Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning I had that rarest of gifts in this place. The shortest commodity we have of course is time, and I had a spare hour. So I spent that hour catching up on constituent matters. There is a pile of committee work I could have done, but I thought it was important to remember this place is not the real world and to connect with it. So I made about a dozen calls to constituents that had built up over the last couple of weeks. As someone who does respect and love this institution and its role, it was embarrassing to hear what people in my electorate thought of us after a fortnight of nonsense. If you had asked me last Friday, 'Could the government have had a worse week after the nonsense of last week, with the $122 million household postal opinion survey?', I would have said, 'Nah, it's impossible.' But, sure enough, we have the Deputy Prime Minister, who turns out to be a foreign citizen—but that's not a problem in Turnbull-land—and then the conspiracy that this somehow is our fault. I am still waiting to see if the Hansard does in fact minute the Foreign Minister's look as magnum or blue steel. It was a delightful, conservative older woman who summed it up best for me when she said, 'Look, I'd probably prefer there was a different word to 'marriage', but, for goodness sake, would you just get on and resolve it. Vote for it. Spend $122 million on something. Fix the energy prices. Invest something in domestic violence. Invest something in fixing Centrelink wait times, because I'm recovering from cancer and can't spend all day on the phone.' What a joke! (Time expired)