Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You have the opportunity to work with us to make sure that we listen to Indigenous Australians and get the outcomes that they deserve. But you are not going to do it through a treaty process that you have embarrassingly walked away from, and when you've talked in a duplicitous way to the Australian public on this topic. There's a makarrata commission that's being funded but is operating in secrecy, which you will not speak anything about. The Prime Minister has the opportunity to step up and unite the Australian public. He is not doing that. When a Prime Minister makes a deliberate decision to harm our national interest, I'll tell you who is watching—the entire Australian public, because they are disappointed in this Prime Minister. He has the chance to do good and he's choosing not to do so.

When he goes up to Garma, he can be sincere this time. At the last Garma conference, he provided detail of the words but has provided no detail every day since that point. That's the problem here. The problem is not with the Australian public, as those opposite want us to believe. The Australian public are not hard-hearted. People aren't saying they're voting no because they don't want to support Indigenous Australians. They will vote no because they know this Prime Minister is wilfully withholding detail from them.

That is unconscionable, and it's something the Prime Minister should apologise for. It's something that he should be upfront about with the Australian public so they can be properly informed when they cast their vote. But every day—bearing in mind we're less than three months from this referendum vote—the Prime Minister makes a decision not to look Australians in the eye and answer the questions that they appropriately are putting to him. And when an Australian Prime Minister breaks that trust with the Australian people, who voted for him only 15 months ago, they work out that this bloke is a phony and a fraud and is running an incompetent government.

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