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

Mr Deputy President, thank you for that guidance. I say to the previous speaker that the arrogance shown by Minister Conroy and Minister Burke just shows the contempt in which this government holds the Australian public, and yet this is a government that Senator Ludlam and his team have kept in power for the last three years. Fancy the hypocrisy of the Greens political party in complaining about Senator Conroy and Mr Burke, when they have kept them in power in the last three years!

This refusal, the cavalier way in which ministers in this chamber simply ignore the rules of the Senate and ignore senators who ask questions and expect answers and the way in which they simply do not follow the forms of a democratic parliament—that contempt is typical of the contempt with which the Labor Party have treated Australians in the last three years, from the time when the Prime Minister promised solemnly, hand on heart, that she would never introduce a carbon tax, and then immediately and capriciously and knowingly broke that solemn promise, until today, when ministers completely ignore the processes of democracy by refusing to answer questions. When Senator Ludlam, as a Greens senator, as part of the Labor-Greens alliance, gives notice to the minister that he is going to raise this, does the minister do anything about it at all? Absolutely nothing. The contempt and the arrogance with which the Labor Party treat this parliament is palpable.

If the people of Australia need any other reason, any other evidence, of how poor this government is, they only have to look at the way in which the Labor Party treat with contempt the people of Australia in the way they run this parliament.