Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

It's extraordinary that this minister cares so little for the substance of his own amendment that, on moving the amendment, he could not even bring himself to give a speech in support of it. It shows the hollowness and the grubbiness of this failure of a minister that he's not even prepared to speak in favour of his own amendment. What an extraordinary state of affairs that we have a minister, the justice minister, who, with a bill that is already complete—a bill that has come to us from the Senate, a bill that has bipartisan support, a bill that achieves tougher penalties, a bill that does something about gun trafficking in this country—wants to actually worsen that bill and weaken that bill. He is putting forward an extraordinary and pathetic amendment which he's not even prepared to give a speech in favour of. What kind of minister is this? He is a failure of a minister.

It's extraordinary. He likes to talk about the 2010 mandatory minimum that was introduced by a Labor government for an offence called 'aggravated people smuggling'. Is this failure of a minister seriously suggesting that the introduction of that mandatory sentence stopped people smuggling? I don't think so. If he is, let him say it. But I don't think he is saying that, and he's clearly not listening—

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