Shorten slams the 'part-time Parliament'It is true people don't pay so much attention to what happens in the Parliament these days as they once did.
But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Manager of Opposition Business Tony Burke both gave great speeches, when pressing the government on Thursday afternoon.
Shorten began:
Quote:Australians are outraged that this government is too scared to turn up to Parliament, with the Parliament just sitting — after it rises next week — for 10 days in the next eight months. The rest of Australia doesn't get to take months and months off work when it feels scared about coming to work, so why is the Prime Minister insisting on a part-time Parliament?
I have wondered what would happen to members of the CFMEU if they ran an industrial action campaign and proposed this in the lunch shed one morning: 'I have a great idea. Let's only go to work for 10 days in the next eight months.' They would probably be sacked. Indeed, this government would like to put them in jail. But it's one standard for the Morrison ministry and another standard for the workers of Australia.
The part-time parliament, however, points to a bigger issue. This is a government that has simply ceased to govern. Not only have they given up governing but they have given up pretending to govern. They have no agenda and no legislation. They are just being swept along by the currents of hate and division in the river that is the government coalition ranks.
Meanwhile, Burke observed:
Quote:For the first time since 1901, the Parliament is planning to sit for only 10 days in an eight-month period. A lot of the debate has been, 'Maybe that's because they're scared of the numbers on the floor of the parliament,' but we're missing the other point: every time the parliament meets, the party room meets ...
I can understand why they want to reduce the number of party room meetings between now and the election.
Morrison attacks Labor in returnThe Prime Minister, as he keeps doing, responded by attacking Labor for being cocky — as if it was all Labor's doing that the government is in such trouble — and stretched his talking points out for the allotted time to attack Labor, and talk about unemployment … which may well be on his mind.
Keep in mind that this is the same Coalition which brought cardboard cut-outs of then prime minister Kevin Rudd into the House in February 2008, expressing outrage about his absence from the House. But also keep in mind the circumstances of this incident: Rudd had moved to have the House sit an extra day each sitting week — on Fridays — to get through more work.
The threat is now coming from a new directionSomething feels like it has snapped in Canberra this week. Years of sometimes bizarre rhetoric from the right of the Coalition — arguments about how it was going to lose because of the threat from the right and One Nation, about how it was in trouble because it had moved too far to the "left" — have fallen silent.
No-one is talking about the threat from the right and One Nation just now.
While the government insists there are no lessons from the repeated wallopings it has been receiving in federal and state elections and by-elections, the threat is from the centre ground of politics, a place to which the Coalition appears to have lost the coordinates.
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