Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to make a very short contribution on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Making Sure Every State and Territory Gets Their Fair Share of GST) Bill 2018, because this is a government that is getting on with the job and we don't need to spend the next 20 minutes talking about that. But I do wish to pay tribute to six people who have made a really significant contribution. The first is, of course, the former Treasurer, the current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who is the person who has managed to shepherd through what was said to be—and I won't name the people who said this; we all know who they were—impossible to achieve. But he has achieved it.

The other people I wish to pay tribute to are my Senate colleagues from Western Australia. Two of them are in the chamber this evening—Senator Dean Smith and Senator Linda Reynolds. The others are Senators Michaelia Cash and Mathias Cormann. The genesis of this significant national reform and the hard work that was done in achieving it were largely done before my time in the Senate, and I wish to acknowledge the significant contribution of my four colleagues in standing up for the rights of Western Australia, standing up for the proper place of the Senate as a states' house in this Federation and achieving what many said was impossible: significant reform of GST-sharing arrangements to the significant benefit of our home state of Western Australia. I thank you all.