Pyne, Christopher, MP

Mr PYNE (Sturt—Manager of Opposition Business) (14:14): I second the motion. I say to the House that standing orders should be suspended in order to allow the Prime Minister the opportunity to come back into the chamber and make a full explanation to the House about her involvement and that of her officers in the gift of at least $90,000 to the member for Dobell from the New South Wales ALP to settle his defamation action with Fairfax Media Ltd and about any discussions she has had with the member for Dobell about his remaining in the House or as Chair of the House Standing Committee on Economics. Since last Tuesday we have asked eight questions in this place of the Prime Minister or other ministers about what they knew and when and about their confidence in the member for Dobell. All we have had in response from the Prime Minister is stonewalling and obfuscation. Any other prime minister worth their salt–whether it is the current member for Griffith or the former Prime Minister John Howard or Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating or Bob Hawke—would have understood the necessity to take action today, or in fact weeks ago, to restore integrity to this government. If the Prime Minister was worth her salt, she would come into the House, she would make an explanation about everything she knows and she would clear the air. She would do so to restore integrity in this government in the eyes of the public. But we know what she has said about how much she loves power. She told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005: 'I'd cheerfully kill several hundred people to get the opportunity to be a minister in the short term.' We know that she was prepared to assassinate—politically assassinate—the member for Griffith when he was the Prime Minister. Goodness knows what she will do to cling to power. The SPEAKER: The member for Sturt must relate his remarks to the suspension. Mr PYNE: The reason it is relevant, Mr Speaker, is that the Prime Minister has spent the last week obfuscating and stonewalling in this House, because we know she will do anything to avoid having to go to the people from losing the member for Dobell. If she had the integrity that she claims, she would come into the House and put this issue behind her, clear the air and restore integrity into a government that is struggling. The controversy surrounding the member for Dobell is paralysing the government. The government is utterly distracted by it. For weeks allegations, claims and supposed misrepresentations have dribbled out through the press and have now become an avalanche of stories every day for the last week. The issue has paralysed the government, a government that was already struggling and already showing it was incapable of occupying the government benches. Whether it was the live cattle export issue or the protection of our borders, the Malaysian solution, the announcement of the carbon tax or the breaking of the promise on the carbon tax that she made before the election, restoring confidence in the economy or protecting Australian families from rising cost-of-living pressures, these are the issues the Australian public cares about and these are the issues the government cannot and will not address while it is paralysed and distracted by the controversy surrounding the member for Dobell. We move this motion to suspend standing orders to give the Prime Minister the opportunity to give a 10-minute speech, because we in the opposition want to give the Prime Minister the opportunity to clear the air, to put this matter behind her government—to move on so that ministers and backbenchers, the opposition and the government can all focus on what matters to the Australian people, which is their jobs and their livelihoods in a collapsing international economy. With the crisis of confidence among the community in this government and in the economy and with daily stories about job losses—whether it is at BlueScope or OneSteel or Westpac or Qantas—these are the issues we want to get on to, but until we get answers from the Prime Minister and the member for Dobell about the controversy surrounding him the government is paralysed and distracted, and that is why the Prime Minister must come into the House and give a full explanation of her involvement. (Time expired)