Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a statement of fact: I'm not allowed to. But, if it assists the chair, I'll withdraw that. It is strange, though, isn't it—even when the entire country is saying just that. You couldn't read out in this chamber the headlines in most of the newspapers. They're calling into question the Prime Minister's pattern of a loose relationship with the truth. That is parliamentary—well established. Here, we must use nicer words. We can say 'untruth', 'falsehoods', 'a pattern of mendacity' or, as Winston Churchill famously said to get around this very problem, 'terminological inexactitude'. A bit of rhyming slang is apparently okay—the old 'Bob Cryer', 'Dunlop tyre', 'sounds like flyer'. But it is beyond question that the government is led by a man regularly observed as falsifying, misleading, avoiding, deceiving, dissembling and double-dealing—making stuff up in common parlance. I've read the Practice. You can't make imputations on character or motive, but you can observe on the behaviours. That's entirely parliamentary. But there are real-world consequences to the Prime Minister's pattern of behaviour, or factual inaccuracies if you want to be neutral.

The Prime Minister told Australians that we were at the front of the queue for vaccines. But that wasn't true. We were last in the developed world. Australians endured months of lockdowns because of this guy's spin and marketing. The Prime Minister told Australians that he'd deliver higher real wages. But that's not true. Last year, the Prime Minister presided over an economy where real wages fell by $700. In his first six years in government, including when he was the Treasurer, real wages in this country went backwards—real wages went backwards under this government, near last in the developed world. He told journalists he wasn't on holiday in Hawaii. But that's exactly where he was. It wasn't true, was it? The Prime Minister claims he's opposed to mandatory vaccinations, but that's not true either. He's imposed them on aged-care workers, Australians returning home and quarantine workers. Even journalists who attend his press conferences have to be vaccinated.

The Prime Minister says that Labor is always higher taxing and higher spending and the Liberals are lower, except that the two highest-taxing, highest-spending governments in the last 30 years have been Liberal governments. Some of his untruths are just weird. He forgets that the television records things and that you can watch it. He said that he didn't ridicule electric vehicle technology, but he said that they'd end weekends, wouldn't tow a trailer and would stop Australians from going camping. He said that he didn't support Clive Palmer's challenge to Western Australian borders, except that he spent $1 million of taxpayer money doing just that. He said that he never said 'Shanghai Sam', but he said it 17 times on 11 occasions. How can Australians trust anything that comes out of this Prime Minister's mouth given his record of falsehoods day after day after day?

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