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VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the shambles in the lower house

At the end of the first sitting week of parliament, Labor caught the government flat-footed and without a majority in the House of Representatives. Michelle Grattan tells University of Canberra deputy vice-chancellor Nick Klomp that Labor gave the government the impression everything was going to go the way it usually does on a Thursday afternoon.

“Then of course it pulled on its motion. Now the government should have anticipated that there could have been a bit of trickery at the end of the week and was just too complacent, not organised enough and ended up today very red-faced with quite a few MPs saying ‘Sorry sir! Sorry sir! Shouldn’t have left class’,” she says.

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