Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a sad day for Her Majesty’s opposition. February was going to be the month of the smoking gun and it has just petered out. We now have a clapped-out popgun to show for the ALP’s activities over the last month. The smoking gun became the clapped-out popgun. Clearly, what we have seen today is an opposition that is incapable of fulfilling its responsibilities to the Australian people. It is an opposition that in 10 years has not learned one lesson. Don’t you think that at the end of 10 years of a government you might have seen those opposite walk in here and talk about what their plan was for Australia for the next 10 years—a plan to get themselves out of opposition and into government? All we had was a pathetic group of speeches that showed the decline that the Australian Labor Party is now in.

Even the once great John Faulkner, who is clearly getting towards the end of his time, the man who was responsible for Cheryl Kernot, the man who nearly—and thank God he failed—had Mark Latham as Prime Minister of this country, was talking to us about government accountability. I will go back to one particular incident—I could talk all day about this—as I was there. Some said that I was actively involved, and it is not a comment that I will rapidly deny. It is the sports rorts affair with Ros Kelly. Senator Faulkner and others have got a gall to come into this place and talk about government accountability. How dare you talk about this subject. This is the party that with the backing of a Labor Party Prime Minister, for five months, tried to con the Australian people into believing that this was a minister who had done nothing wrong. At the end of five months, when Ros Kelly finally resigned, what did we find out about government accountability ALP style? We found out that Minister Kelly had gone down to the basement and, with four or five people, trundled out four or five blackboards and had written down on the blackboards the names of Labor marginal seats and beside them had written, ‘grants for sports facilities funding’.

That was the most obscene abrogation of ministerial and parliamentary responsibilities we have ever seen in this country. As was said at the time, Mr Squiggle must have written them up there because the minister apparently knew nothing about them. I vividly remember the look on Ralph Willis’s face when I produced a fax sent to him by Minister Kelly suggesting that he might want to get in touch with her very quickly because she noticed that he had some applications in for funding. How you have got the gall to talk about government accountability is absolutely beyond me.

I am sure others on this side have talked about it, but in the time left to me let us have a little discussion about Centenary House.