Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also wish to take note of the answer given by Senator Cormann to my question on why Malcolm Turnbull is no longer the Prime Minister of Australia. I think the answer is relatively clear and relatively succinct. The answer seems to revolve around the contribution of Senator Cormann and a group of like-minded people. Some of the media commentariat have managed to provide some fairly succinct paragraphs in their journals. First, there was Adelaide's The Advertiser, on 30 August 2018: 'Finance Minister Mathias Cormann managed to pledge loyalty to three prime ministers or would-be prime ministers in the space of three days. This has to be some sort of a record. It might also indicate that loyalty is not high on his list of priorities. Senator Cormann, when confronted by the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull and told that his switch this week was akin to giving in to terrorists, said he knew, adding that he had no choice. He did, but he made the wrong one, given the combination of damage to his reputation and the loss of respect of friends inside and outside of parliament.' Another reputable journalist, David Speers, said: 'One cabinet minister reckons either Dutton or Mathias Cormann lied to him about the numbers and led them off a cliff.'

When I move around South Australia, people ask, 'What happened to the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull? What happened to Prime Minister Turnbull? Who's this new bloke? Why has he gone?' Well, the answer lies fairly and squarely over there, with the Hon. Mathias Cormann, who decided at a very late point to change his allegiance from the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull to the Hon. Peter Dutton. He did the right thing, as he said—the Westminster system: go down the courtyard, look down the camera, resign, and off you go.

But it appears as if they couldn't count! The unfortunate predicament he was in then was that he was on the backbench for a day and then he had to declare allegiance to a new Prime Minister. I think he was on the backbench for probably two hours or maybe four hours and then he was back in charge. It really goes to the heart of the issue here. I know that the government is making a great story about its contribution to economics, its contribution to job growth and the like, but it doesn't have a great record on contributions to middle Australia out there. The growth rate for wages is extremely low in historic terms. Middle Australia is missing out in a whole, powerful way. It couldn't be clearer that wage stagnation is really hurting middle Australia. They can bang on all they like, but the simple fact is that company profits are growing more than five times faster than wages. So, the trickle-down economics that's so often espoused in here is not getting through.

We're seeing that in the Newspolls, 40 of which we've now seen—40 negative Newspolls—and if they keep going I think it's possible they could get to a 60-40 vote. If they can get to 56-44 I think you can go worse. I think they can actually get worse than where they are. Look at what happened in Wagga on the weekend, where there was a 29 per cent swing in a seat they've held for 60 years! These are pretty gloomy times for those over there.

There was the shambolic episode of the Prime Minister not telling even his closest leadership team that he was going to have a spill in caucus. No-one in his leadership team knew he was going to have a spill, and then to get gazumped by his own party, and to torture his own party by demanding 43 signatures on a petition, and to keep it going, live by the minute, every single day. The most uninterested elector in Australia knows what happened last week. They can probably point out a few of the main actors in there, and Senator Cormann was right in the middle of all that. If it's true, as the commentators say, that he's cast aspersions on his own loyalty instincts, I can just say this: when there were leadership challenges in the Labor Party I saw people who got up, resigned and walked away. They didn't join the next team, they didn't join the next leader; they got up, took a principled position and stepped back. That's probably what the Westminster system envisages, not resigning for four hours and coming back in the same job a day later. Anyway, that's for the people on that side to worry about. All we know is that middle Australia has looked at this as disgraceful.