Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

You can tell from the half-hearted attempts by Senator Sterle and Senator O’Brien to defend a very incompetent minister in Minister Carr that not even they believe that he is defendable. The website of the CRC program administered by the government says in its first line, ‘The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research has overall responsibility for the Cooperative Research Centre’s program.’ Yet, all Senator Carr could do at question time today was try to abrogate his responsibility and blame someone else. It is quite clear that Minister Carr is responsible, not some group that he tried to blame.

The only thing in the defence by Labor senators that made any sense to me was the comment by Senator Sterle, and I quote him roughly, that ‘all wisdom in relation to rural and regional Australia is on this side of the chamber’. I agree with Senator Sterle on that. If you have a look around you will see that on this side of the chamber there are senators who understanding rural and regional Australia, who come from rural and regional Australia, who have made their livings from rural and regional Australia and who understand the issues in rural and regional Australia. Regrettably, all of my colleagues opposite live in capital cities and really have little interest and certainly no knowledge—