The Turnbull government has continued to cop flak from Labor and the right wing of the prime minister’s own party for being the first government to lose a vote in the lower house for more than 40 years.
Labor’s Tony Burke has said the Coalition failed the standard it had set for itself, that “if you can’t control the parliament, you can’t govern”.
As the opposition manager of business, Burke was the architect of the strategy which caused Malcolm Turnbull’s government to lose three votes on the floor of the parliament late on Thursday.
Dissident senator Cory Bernardi – who has been causing headaches for his leader by trying to water down section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act – also criticised the government’s handling of the votes on Thursday.
“If you’re talking about me derailing government ideas, nothing derails a government like losing a votes in the lower house for the first time in 40 or 50 years,” Bernardi told Sky News.
“So I am not going to suspend what’s important to the Liberal party in favour of those people who can’t even control the Liberal party in the lower house.”
Senior Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese said the loss of the procedural votes late on Thursday were symptomatic of a born-to-rule attitude.
“When you’re convinced you’re born to rule – as many of those in the Liberal and National parties are – then you think you don’t have to work on it,” Albanese told Sky News.
“You think it just comes naturally. And that, I think, is what reflects the policy focus of this government. It reflects the organisational focus – they’re a lazy government, they don’t have a policy agenda. They don’t have organisational discipline, they think this government business is all easy.”
Burke criticised the government leader of the house, Christopher Pyne, who is responsible for the Coalition’s strategy in the parliament.
Pyne had previously led the Coalition’s strategy against the minority Gillard government in the 43rd parliament as manager of opposition business. Operating with fewer seats than the present Coalition government, Julia Gillard never lost a vote on the floor of the lower house.
“Christopher Pyne referred to the fact that Menzies had been defeated three times on the floor and that was enough to justify a government being terminated,” Burke told Insiders.
“Christopher Pyne argued that if you can’t control the parliament, you can’t govern. The standards that they set for themselves, that we had to survive for three years on, they didn’t last three days.”
Three days after the embarrassing Coalition defeat in parliament, Malcolm Turnbull remains under pressure from those within his own party – even as he flew off to attend the G20 in China.
Reports on the weekend said the former prime minister Tony Abbott had confronted the treasurer, Scott Morrison, over the superannuation reform package that seeks to rein in the Howard government’s generous concessions for high-income earners.
The Australian reported that Abbott argued in an internal meeting that the government was wrong to offer super concessions to low-income earners after Turnbull and Morrison restored the Gillard government’s low-income superannuation tax offset, which benefits those earning less than $37,000.
The health minister, Sussan Ley, denied there was disquiet over the superannuation policy and described the Coalition as being in a “good place”.
Bernardi, who is an Abbott supporter, rejected suggestions that his constant lobbying to remove 18C was a challenge to Turnbull’s leadership.
“I don’t want this to turn into some sort of proxy leadership battle because this bill is exactly the same one myself, senator Dean Smith and a couple of others took to the previous parliament under Tony Abbott,” Bernardi said.
He said his 18C bill, which would remove the words “insult” and “offend” from the Racial Discrimination Act, was more pressing because the Liberal party needed to reconnect with its base after the election result, which cut the Coalition’s substantial majority.
“But it’s more pressing now because the Liberal party clearly needs to reconnect with its base,” Bernardi said. “I think I am pretty close to the base on this and they want the Liberal party to honour its commitment from the 2013 election.
“And Malcolm Turnbull supported these modest reforms when he wanted to be prime minister and he has supported them publicly since he has been prime minister and I want the Liberal party to run the agenda on this.”
