Day 126

Day 126 Canberra

Well today we went in to watch our government in action. We had booked tickets for question time last week and in we went today. I am not sure if it is that we are getting used to our bed or that with daylight saving has 8am being 5 am in WA or what but we are sleeping in until 9am here. We sprang out of bed and started getting ready and headed off to Parliament House. We had a few stops on the way so we ended up there just before 12 and we headed up to the top. We wanted to drop in to see what the place was like before we had to do it for real. We had to drop off Maureen’s bag into the cloakroom. You cannot take in bags or phones or cameras, hence no pictures today, sorry. We went into the House of Reps and there were 5 people there, the only one we recognised was Ruddick. He waited around whilst some Labour guy went on about amending some wine bill as they saw some restriction on it affecting grape growers etc. We came in halfway through so not 100% sure what it was about. The guy sat down and Ruddick stood up and said he wanted a list of bills referred to a reference group to check before they could respond and the deputy speaker said – no worries. Ruddick then left – exit stage left! We then went over to the Senate and there were only a few there too. Some Liberal was up talking about how he was not afraid to be politically incorrect and most Australians agreed with him. I must admit I did tend to agree with him on most of it – such as just because you voice concern over immigrants, does not make you a racist, and things like that, again we came halfway through so did not get the full gist of it. By that time it was close to 12:30 so we went and had lunch.

The guy at the cloak room where we had to pick up tickets said we only had a short time to go so we went to the queue for question time. The attendant said we had ages left and why didn’t we go up on the roof area and enjoy the views. Instead of doing this we tagged onto a tour group. We went around Parliament again and at the end we still had a few minutes so we lined up for our seats. We got into the House of Reps about 1:45 and there were about 7 or 8 already there doing business. The deputy speaker was there and over the next few minutes 130 plus members came in. At 2 exactly, Bromwyn Bishop appeared and took the speaker’s chair and everyone was there ready for business. Question time started and the opposition started in on Abbott about education funding. They asked if he could guarantee that no school would be worse off under his government. Abbott said that Labour had with drawn $1.2b in funding from WA, Qld and NT and they had put it back in. the opposition asked this same question about 5 times in slightly different ways, they added in could they guarantee the state governments would not cut school funding, which they could not do as state governments do their own thing. This went back and forward then the Liberals put up gimme questions where they asked about funding changes to WA, Qld and NT, each one putting up the question from their own state and then the opposition called for a censure motion but mucked it up the first time, then tried again, then debate went on about it and then they called a vote and by the time that was done there was no more time for questions and at 3:30 we were kicked out. New members were going to do maiden speeches and they had invited friends and supporters. The member for Indi – Cathy McGowan was doing one and just about every supporter was there. There were hundreds of them n supporter t-shirts.

We left Parliament House and headed home. Tomorrow we leave Canberra and start heading home.