Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, so keep an eye out for me. I hope to be heading west at 800 kilometres an hour by the time the adjournment motion is moved tomorrow night, which is obviously the last sitting night for the calendar year 2013, so I hope you will forgive me for taking the opportunity tonight to offer up a few reflections on life and work in this place. As anyone who is watching the ongoing debacle of the Western Australian count, recount, court challenge and so on would be well aware, there is nothing quite like a political near-death experience to remind you how much you value your time in here, your colleagues, the achievements and challenges and, most of all, the huge privilege we have to work in this place.

If anyone is watching this on a ratty little YouTube video after the fact or is listening on the radio, I can confirm that the chamber is basically empty, as it so often is, particularly at adjournment time. So my audience tonight is, with great respect, not the people in here but mostly people outside this building, particularly people who could not be bothered to cast a vote on 7 September. They either did not turn up at all and risked a fine or showed up and, as our scrutineers discovered—and there were an alarmingly large number of people who did this—took the time not to vote but to draw reasonably detailed renderings of genitalia or make some sort of swearing contribution on their ballot paper.

A lot of Australians do not vote. Younger people or people who are simply disillusioned for whatever reason—because of the general idea that no matter who you vote for some politician always seems to get elected, because of some affinity with Russell Brand's spectacular rant over not bothering to vote because the whole system is just a waste of time or because of the view that their vote does not matter, that there is no point—this is partly for you.

I take this opportunity to congratulate my government colleagues for making their way over to those benches and commiserate with my ALP colleagues. It has been fascinating to observe the Abbott team, who were so brutally effective in opposition—and hats off to them for it—turn out to be absolutely hopeless at being the government. It has been absolutely hilarious. They are just not very good at it. The more practice they get, the worse they seem to become at it. It is extraordinarily entertaining. They are like the kid who accidentally ties his own shoelaces together. They are stumbling around from debacle to disaster in a series of spasmodic policy lurches that would be hilarious if people's lives were not being ruined all over the place.

We have heard, even earlier on today, quite a bit about a mandate—'Respect my mandate'—from Tony Abbott and various others in the government. But this is one of the most perceptive things that I think has ever come out of Mr Abbott's mouth. He said on 1 December 2009, coincidently the first day he was the Leader of the Opposition:

Oppositions are not there to get legislation through. Oppositions are there to hold the government to account, and unless we are confident a piece of legislation is beyond reasonable doubt in the national interest, it is our duty, as the opposition, to vote it down.

That was actually quite perceptive. It was quite an effective rendering of what it means to be an opposition or a crossbench senator in here. I am not a member of the executive. Your mandate as the executive depends on your ability to weld together a working majority in the House of Representatives and to be able to pass legislation through this parliament. The people who voted for me and the people who voted for the majority of those in this chamber did not vote to have you destroy the effective action we have managed to pull together on global warming, which is surely the most significant challenge that confronts our country. They certainly did not vote for me to just wave through the kinds of obscenities that are occurring at the moment in the name of the national interest, depending on various tortured definitions wheeled out by George Brandis.