Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Not the ABC’s The 7.30 Report; it is the politician Kerry O’Brien, who is in parliament. I read the doorstop interview. I was quite impressed, I have to confess, not by its content but by its fluency and its conciseness. But there was something else about it that rang a bell with me. It was eerily familiar. By the way, it is dated 15 May and it deals with the budget. It is the budget response given a week later. Leaving that aside, I return to the media statement that the same shadow minister issued on 9 May with regard to the budget. Remarkably, I find that the doorstop is almost identical to the media interview. In fact, the media statement is 329 words, and 300 of them are replicated exactly in the doorstop.

I know the experience of a doorstop is a very intimidating one. National correspondents representing the best and brightest of journalism are gathered around you, close up and personal, firing questions from all angles. You commit a few phrases to memory but you cannot commit whole sentences, whole paragraphs or whole pages to memory. I have highlighted the documents that I have here in colour code for the convenience of opposition members. Here is the media statement of 9 May—I feel like I am on Media Watch—and here is the doorstop interview. You can see that it is reproduced almost in whole.

The farmers of Australia want more than phantom doorstops. They want more than a shadow minister who plagiarises himself. They want considered policy, and they are not getting it from the Labor Party now, and nor will they get it in the future. I table the media statement and the subsequent doorstop.

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