Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a parent, I have found it amusing but slightly irritating to watch the Prime Minister throw the granddaddy of all temper tantrums in the past two days. If a child were doing this, one would be tempted to characterise it as a game a spoiled little boy had made up all by himself. The game would be called ‘beat the inflation genie’, and the little boy would have written all the rules himself with absolutely no help at all from the grownups. One of the primary rules he would have adopted would be that no-one can play unless they agree with that little boy’s rules. Of course, in this situation we are not dealing with the underdeveloped emotions of a child; we are dealing with the expectations of an adult, the person who is supposed to be the country’s most responsible adult. We are dealing with the expectations of the Prime Minister.

Australia has had the details of this package only since Tuesday afternoon. Parliament has not had any time at all to analyse it in detail, yet it is the largest expenditure by a federal government in 35 years. In the view of the coalition—and I am pleased to say of the other non-government parties—it deserves detailed parliamentary scrutiny and will, because of the moves of the coalition and the other non-government parties, receive some detailed parliamentary scrutiny, though certainly not with the approval of the government, who are doing their best to stop scrutiny of this bill. The government wanted to push this bill through parliament in 48 hours. As my colleague Senator Fisher pointed out, that equates to $1 billion an hour that we would have been throwing out onto the Australian public and through which we would have been racking up debts for them for years to come.