5&5: 4&4

With only three sitting days, this week it’s the 4&4.

With everything that happened on October 7th, and everything that’s happened since, it’s too serious a subject to put in my list, but it’s how Parliament started this week.

The Opposition voted against a resolution marking the anniversary.

The sections of the motion Peter Dutton took objection to? The ones that called for peace. 

BEST

1.   Housing help

2.   Welcome home

3.   Making a difference

4.   Protecting the NBN

WORST

1.   Short memories

2.   Preferential treatment

3.   Peter 'Agro' Dutton

4.   The race that stops... Parliament?

1. Labor remains committed to helping 40,000 Australians get a foot on the property ladder, with the reintroduction of the Housing co-ownership bill on Tuesday.  Housing Minister Clare O’Neil urged the Opposition, Greens and crossbench to put politics aside.

“We have a generation of low- and middle-income people who are stuck in rent traps, who feel anger and despair at the notion that homeownership feels out of reach. All of us in this chamber have constituents who are making major life decisions— delaying children, spending two hours in a car every day getting to and from work—because they can't find the housing that they need. It's not good enough. That is why our government is so committed to making a difference to this problem.”

2. The Prime Minster announced on Tuesday the arrival of the first Australian Government flights from Lebanon, to get Australians and their family members out of harm’s way. I was honoured to be at Sydney airport on Monday night to personally welcome the first flight home. One returning Australian, Aurore Gharib, told the media she was very proud to be a citizen. To quote her: 'The things the Australian government did for us, nobody in the world would do.' Our message to Australians in Lebanon remains to please take the first flight option that is available to you. There should not be an empty seat on any of these flights.

3. An independent review of our life-changing paid Family and Domestic Violence Leave has found it’s making a big different to the lives of people – and they’re mostly women – who’ve experienced violence at the hands of a partner. Thanks to the Albanese Labor Government, survivors no longer need to choose between safety and paying the bills.

This is one of a number of things that our government has undertaken to improve the position of victim-survivors of domestic violence. It is still far too widespread in our community. We all, of course, see the tragic murders of too many women at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, close family members and other relatives. It’s something that we do want to stop, and providing this leave entitlement, we think, is an important way of assisting victim-survivors.

4. On Wednesday, we introduced legislation that will keep the National Broadband Network in public hands, safeguarding the service from future Coalition governments. Graham Perrett reminded us what life was like without it. I'm actually old enough to remember; the member for Casey probably isn't—that we used to have this thing where we would dial up to get the internet. Your speeches were like that sound—I could just hear it in my head—when you didn't get through. You tried to get a connection, but it just didn't work.

1. Peter Dutton and Dan Tehan organised a full scale attack on immigration on Wednesday, with every question about visas for people who’ve come to Australia from Palestine. Their complaint against visitor visas completely fell apart when the Opposition Leader had to face the fact that he had never stopped people from coming on visitor visas, from any country in the world, during the entire nine years of their government.

2. The Liberal’s hypocrisy over preferences earned a rebuke from the PM on Tuesday. They want Labor to rule out preferencing the Greens at the next general election. Maybe they should take their own advice. “If they're worried about preferences going to the Greens and about the Greens being elected to parliament, I would say that the only reason there are Greens in the Queensland parliament is that the Queensland LNP put them there with their preferences.”

3. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, Peter Dutton is always angry.  Jason Clare nailed it when he looked straight at the Opposition Leader and said he had ‘more Agro than Cartoon Connection’. Apologies to anyone who is not Gen X and has absolutely no idea of the reference, but I loved it.

4. After asking every question on immigration on Tuesday, by Wednesday, Dan Tehan had clearly decided it hadn’t gone quite as he hoped. For our next parliamentary week, which includes the first Tuesday of November, he publicly said he wanted to take the day off, so instead of having to go through Question Time, he could go to the races.

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That's all from me in the week I celebrated my 20th year as a Federal MP.

Parliament is back next month, for the last three sitting weeks of the year.

'til then,

Tony

PS. Thanks to Dan Tehan, my song of the week is Daryl Braithwaite's iconic version of The Horses.