STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator WALKER (South Australia) (13:58): I have to say that watching Senator Andrew Bragg's National Press Club address yesterday felt less like watching an alternative government and more like watching the Liberal Party have a very public midlife crisis. They've lost an election, they don't know who they are anymore, and now they're turning up with a new haircut, a new personality and some policies nobody else in the family knew they'd bought.

Senator Bragg used the National Press Club to announce his preferred migration target, propose cuts to international students and working holiday-makers and offer his diagnosis of where Australia has gone wrong. There was just one pretty big issue: apparently none of this was actually Liberal Party policy. Within 24 hours, Angus Taylor had to publicly tell his own frontbencher off and remind him that shadow cabinet ministers are supposed to reflect the agreed position of the shadow cabinet.

That is not exactly the picture of a government in waiting. And Senator Bragg did not stop there. He described the Morrison government years as madness and said that he had regrets that he hadn't done more to stop it.

Fair enough. Plenty of Australians had already drawn that conclusion themselves. The difference is that they weren't in the Liberal party room at the time.

Australians are entitled to ask who is running the show over there. Because at the moment the Liberal Party doesn't look like an alternative government. It looks like a group therapy session with the press gallery.

Perhaps, before they start lecturing the country on its direction, they could work out which direction their party is going. I present to you 'Braggy's Big Day Out'. The PRESIDENT: Order!

Senator Walker, may I remind you that, when you refer to others in the other place, you use their correct titles. With that, we'll move to question time.