Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Families and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and the Public Service (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator McAllister today relating to the Morrison Government.

As a longstanding friend of the creative industries, I'm quite worried. I think we may need to offer some sort of industry support package to the political satirists, because this government seems determined to drive them out of business by satirising itself. Prime Minister Morrison has come out and said that a vote for the Liberals is a vote for stability. He said this at the very same time—I kid you not—as his junior coalition partners, The Nationals, are plotting another leadership coup about three weeks after their last one. You can't make this stuff up. It's putting a lot of pressure on The Chaser, let me tell you. 'A vote for stability' is a pretty bold claim for a Prime Minister to make. We recall the last Prime Minister who promised stability. I don't know if you remember, but that other fellow, Mr Turnbull, the last Prime Minister, stood under a huge sign the size of a cinema screen before the last election with a big quote that said 'stable government' and he held his hands up like so. What did we get? It wasn't stable and it wasn't government. It turned out that their only plan for jobs and growth was a corporate tax cut, and they dumped that earlier this month. What about energy? We went through five separate energy policies before they settled on their current energy policy, which is basically absolutely nothing. To top it off, they changed Prime Minister after months of instability and a botched leadership coup by the Minister for Home Affairs, aided and abetted by Senator Cormann.

Given that history it is outrageously audacious for Prime Minister Morrison to claim a vote for the Liberals is a vote for stability. He is very new. We could give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps government under Prime Minister Morrison has been more stable. Let's have a look at what they've achieved this week: they've backflipped on their GST policy; they've upended 70 years of bipartisan foreign policy and risked one of Australia's key strategic economic relationships, our trade relationship with Indonesia; and they've supported a white supremacist slogan in the parliament. That was a mistake, if you believe Minister Cormann, but then they embarrassingly had to back down—and that backdown was a mistake, if you believe Mr Luke Howarth. Apparently that is what stability looks like under this government. Is it stability to appoint your scandal-prone numbers man as Assistant Treasurer, who then, surprisingly—who knew?—is embroiled within an expenses scandal? Is it stability for your environment minister pick a fight with a Nobel Peace Prize nominee in a crowded restaurant? I don't know. Maybe it's stability to spend weeks talking about bullying and harassment of women in your own party ranks—something of an achievement, because women in your organisation are fairly thin on the ground.

Where are we now? At the same time as the Prime Minister is promising a vote for stability, the National Party are plotting to install as Deputy Prime Minister a man whose most recent contribution was to resign after a very public drawn-out scandal. What do all of these things—the vote for a white supremacist slogan, the scandals, the 'maybe it's a decision; maybe it's not' half-decision to move the embassy—have in common?

They all derive from a government that is completely absorbed in itself and in its own internal divisions. They stem from a party room that is utterly unable to agree on the most basic of questions about the desired national direction for our country. They stem from a group of people who, intellectually, can't come to terms with Australia as it is now, let alone the Australia of the future. They're unable to put a plan together to respond to what's coming. They're unable to respond to the science of climate change. They're unable to respond to a changing global economy. They're unable to respond to the demand for greater equality for women and more women in public life. They are unable to respond to change.

This is a government that is completely absorbed in its own conflict, because, between them, they cannot agree on how to deal with the world as it is. It is not leading to stability; it is leading to chaos. It is leading to a paralysed government making ad hoc decisions that, in fact, endanger our national interest. There is no positive vision. They are extremely divided. Wentworth deserves better and so does Australia.