Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Day after day, week after week, Australians have watched anxiously as Australia’s border protection policies unravel before their eyes. All the while, Australians have been seeking straight answers to simple and uncomplicated questions. Why is this happening? What has changed? What is the Prime Minister going to do to stop the boats coming? What do we get from this Prime Minister? A daily diet of weasel words, obfuscation and blame shifting. We have seen a Prime Minister, in an abject abdication of leadership, washing his hands of the responsibility for his own colossal policy failures. As recently as question time today, we heard a Prime Minister who refuses to give straight answers to simple, straightforward, factual questions. Instead, we have a Prime Minister who is tying himself up in tighter and more complicated verbal knots, as he tries to slip and slide away from the answers to the questions he cannot bring himself to answer.

It all began with his fanciful claim that the surge in unauthorised boat arrivals had nothing to do with his own deliberate weakening of our border protection through policy changes he introduced in August last year. Since then, the Rudd government has deliberately unpicked the policies of its predecessor, the coalition, and he has trumpeted his own moral superiority for doing so. He does a great line in sanctimony—I think all of us here recognise that.

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