Senator KNOWLES (3:28 PM) —I am rather pleased that the opposition is yet again wasting time on this issue because it does give me an opportunity to carry on from where I left off yesterday. I did complain in yesterday's five-minute slot that I did not have enough time to go through a complete list of conflicts of interest of the Labor Party. Now I will have time to finish it off.

I think Senator Quirke is probably quite an honourable gentleman, from what I know of him in his short time here. I am sorry he did not follow me yesterday or today because he might have been able to explain to the Senate why the Labor Party remained deafeningly silent through many of those things that I mentioned yesterday, such as Minister Griffiths owning a sandwich shop while he was the minister for industry and Senator Richardson, while minister for communications, being a director of a radio station, not declaring his interests and using his position as a minister to influence the President of the Marshall Islands on behalf of his cousin, Greg Symons.

I wonder why they did not complain about Treasurer Dawkins not declaring that his mother owned Bell shares while Holmes a Court was trying to take over BHP and why they did not complain about Prime Minister Hawke's personal friend Peter Abeles trying to crush the pilots' union. Why didn't they complain about Prime Minister Hawke using his position as PM to collect $1 million from four Western Australian business leaders at the gold tax lunch?

I went on to outline a whole range of other things, like Prime Minister Keating and Gareth Evans using their positions to attack Justice Marks and the royal commission on the Easton affair. Why did they not go for the then minister Carmen Lawrence when the Marks royal commission found that she had lied to the royal commission? They did not do a thing in relation to that. Why did they not have a go at the then Speaker Leo McLeay, who used his position as Speaker to collect $60,000 for falling off his bike? Why did they not have a go at Paul Keating when in the wilderness he bought a piggery using his superannuation as collateral? He did not declare that piggery. They did not have any answers to that.

Why was it all right for Paul Keating to use his position as Treasurer to protect the State Bank of Victoria from going under by selling it to the Commonwealth Bank? Why did they not have a go at Paul Keating when he was Treasurer for not lodging his income tax return for two years? Why did they not have a go at Gary Punch when he was minister for aviation and was opposed to a second runway? Why did they not have a go at Senator Bolkus when he was Minister for Administrative Services for negotiating to move the audit office into the ALP Centenary House, thus just happening to give the ALP an absolute windfall?

Unfortunately, none of those questions have been answered at all. Yet we still have a situation where the Leader of the Opposition in this place, Senator Faulkner, in his screech ing, yelling and screaming across the chamber, has still asked only three questions without notice on unemployment in 12 months. What is wrong? Do you know that in 1997 the opposition did not ask one single solitary question on debt, not one on inflation, not one on interest rates and not one on small business—all the things that are crucial to this country. Inflation is down under the coalition government to zero, and yet not one thing has interested them in those issues.

What has interested them is the question of smut, muckraking, innuendo and everything else that can be smearing the government, but nothing on policy. As I said yesterday and as Senator Hill said today, there are no policies coming from the opposition. Here they are two years into opposition and not one policy—no policy on tax, trade, primary industry, environment, communications, industrial relations, social security, foreign affairs, industry, defence, health, finance, employment, transport, justice, immigration, resources and energy, family services, status of women, veterans' affairs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, schools, vocational education, sport, customs, regional development—not one single solitary policy. They are constantly day after day muckraking and smearing an excellent minister who has been the best minister for resources the country has ever seen.

Question resolved in the affirmative.