Politics

The Government Just Voted To Take A Day Off Because They Can’t Get Their Shit Together

They're shutting down the country to go bicker behind closed doors, and we're are paying them to do it.

by Sam Langford  23 August 2018
adjourn parliament shutdown libspill

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The Liberal Party just voted to adjourn the House of Representatives for the day because they just can’t get their shit together, and oh man, people are spewing.

The motion to adjourn the the House passed 70-68 and was met with cries of “shame” from the 68 people who voted against it.

The shutdown means there’ll be no Question Time today, which is extremely convenient for Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, and the rest of the rapidly disintegrating government, who now won’t have to face any questions from the Opposition.

Instead, the Liberals will spend the time in shifty meetings and on phone calls, trying desperately to agree on who the Prime Minister of our country is going to be.

More importantly, though, this shutdown is particularly shocking because Parliament is not scheduled to sit again until September 10, and as more than a few MPs pointed out, it does in fact have things to get done before then. The Government — all of whom are paid upwards of $200,000 a year — have basically decided to shut down the country and skip work because they don’t feel like it, which is an absolute joke.

Suffice to say, Labor and everyone else in Parliament are not impressed. Speaking against the motion to adjourn, Labor leader Bill Shorten got up and absolutely ripped the Liberals a new one in a blistering speech.

“I said on Tuesday that this is a government which had lost the will to live,” was how he put it. “But I don’t even think on Tuesday we could have seen the cannibalistic behaviour of a government who is eating itself alive. There is no doubt in my mind that the people of Australia think that the system is broken.”

Tanya Plibersek then chipped in with her own violent metaphor, describing Treasurer Scott Morrison — who is now reportedly also challenging for leadership of the Liberal party — as “a hyena, hanging round the corpse of the modern Liberal Party”. She then asked the government to just get it over with and call an election, and “let the people of Australia decide whether they want a government focused only on itself”.

“They’re actually putting up a resolution they don’t want to go to work,” is how Bill Shorten summed up. “The work of the Parliament is in the chamber, not in the meetings behind closed doors.” He’s got a real point. Australia, this is your Liberal government: skipping work to sort out their power struggles, bickering and dealing behind closed doors, getting very little of actual substance done. Remember this, come election time.

As for the Liberals’ leadership spill, they’ve now got a bit more time to spend running around begging each other for votes. We’ll keep you posted on what happens there, as well as how many perfectly good work hours the Government wastes on it.

Meanwhile, the Senate is still sitting. So at least some government MPs will have to face the music.