Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

It could be both, this is true. But there is behind this a pretty serious issue if a minister thinks that he can say something at that dispatch box that is demonstrably untrue. It's not just a political contest; there is documentary evidence from his department on the records online from the City of Sydney, whose website he claims it came from. It is demonstrably untrue at every single level. His statement to the House was unequivocal. There was no hedging in his statement. Does he really think that the standards of Australian governance are so low now that that's okay? We will not get—we haven't seen it before and I hope we won't get it for some time—a mislead as obvious and demonstrable as this one. If the standard of the government is that it's okay to say something at the dispatch box during question time, to the parliament and therefore to the whole of Australia, that on every piece of public evidence looks a tremendous amount like a lie—are we at a point now where the government says, 'Let's just wait for the media cycle to move on'? This doesn't just say something about a deeply incompetent minister. If there's any scandal floating around, if you just hear in the news one day that there is a scandal in the government, you think, 'Ah! The minister for emissions reduction, fair bet'—most days it's a fair place to land. But are we really at the point where—

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