Nova Peris (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. All of them surely must be shaking their heads in disbelief, and they must even be crying that this current crop of Greens is doing a deal with their traditional enemies.

So the Greens have decided to join the grownups, except they have not learnt how to bluff yet. Sadly, the Greens are moving further to the right and will join in with the eccentric crew of the coalition to form a government, if it comes to that. The sad thing is that this would be funny, if it were not a serious issue.

The real issue—what has been thrown around—is that the Greens are actually suffering from 'relevance deprivation syndrome', which is a sad indictment on how they will take any opportunity to claw back some of their relevance that was nurtured and given to them by both of their former leaders. It is relevance that they lost at the last election, when they lost the balance of power in the Senate to the Independents. That is no secret: it is no secret that this bill will wipe out the Independents and the small parties. They will not get a seat in the Senate.

And it is no secret that the government cannot deal with the crossbenchers—we heard that from Senator Lazarus earlier on. It is all too hard for them. Our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, had a much more difficult Senate to deal with but, unlike this government, the Gillard government knew how to negotiate with the crossbenchers—