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

Today, in question time, the Minister for Home Affairs said that I had made a statement which was incorrect. The statement that he was referring to was when I made clear that Labor had not voted against the piece of legislation he was referring to. The statement from the minister is untrue and demonstrably so. That legislation passed the House on 15 October of this year on the voices without objection and without division. It then went through the Senate with an amendment. It was supported at the second reading, it was supported at the third reading and then it went through the House again today, with the support of Labor. In the last couple of moments, it has just now gone through the Senate.

There were four occasions where the Labor Party supported a piece of legislation that the Minister for Home Affairs today claimed we had not. If the Minister for Home Affairs is claiming that somehow by moving an amendment at some point that makes you opposed to the piece of legislation, I would remind the House that Senator Hume moved a government amendment to the same piece of legislation. Unless everybody is opposed to the piece of legislation, the argument put forward by the minister is absurd. When he claims that we opposed the legislation it's not only untrue but untrue twice in this House and twice in the Senate. That is why I made the comments that I did today.

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