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

I withdraw on the basis that the Prime Minister refuses to be here. It is difficult, particularly when the government has taken a decision to use parliamentary process not to debate the matter, which I think reflects very poorly on this Prime Minister. It's a sobering day when the Prime Minister can't be here to defend himself against an allegation in my motion today, which I moved during the course of question time. I quote from that motion: '(c) considers that this constitute a deliberate misleading of the House.' It's a very serious allegation.

What's the basis here? We're talking about the issue of national security. We have a situation where on 7 October there was an attack of the most serious nature in Israel where 1,200 people were slaughtered. One hundred people are still held hostage in a tunnel network, and we know that the atrocities that Hamas committed don't stop there, because they're hiding weapons within the population, under hospitals, in places of worship and in places of gathering, including residential areas, to this very day.

They have no regard for the Israelis, but they have less regard for Palestinians. On 9 October, in our country there was a protest on the steps of the opera house where the antisemitism that we're seeing almost as common practice today was first highlighted and emphasised with that unruly crowd. It's important to recite that part of this story because the Prime Minister, from that very first moment, that very first test of his leadership, decided not to condemn those actions and not to condemn those blatant, obvious and transparent acts of antisemitism.

And what has happened between 9 October and today? We've seen a level of antisemitism in our country that has never been witnessed. We have people who were in the Holocaust as survivors from the camps who shifted here post 1945, and, for the first time in our country's history and in their new lives here in our country, they say that they feel unsafe—in our country! How could that be? How could it be that people who have contributed to our country and have been peaceful in their presence here, who have educated their children and have worked hard and contributed to the fabric of our society—how could they be made to feel unsafe to the point where they're talking about wanting to return to Israel, a country under attack?

It's because of this weak Prime Minister. This Prime Minister had the opportunity on 9 October. We've seen the protests on the university campuses go on for weeks and weeks. We've seen the response on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane and elsewhere around the country. We've seen the blatant acts of antisemitism, of driving them from the river to the sea, talking about annihilating, wiping out and exterminating—exactly the same language that Hitler used in the 1930s. This Prime Minister goes missing in action, and he has the audacity to stand up today to say to us that we should heed the advice from the director-general of ASIO that we need to lower the temperature of debate in this country. This Prime Minister's negligence, this Prime Minister's weakness, has given rise to a level of antisemitism in our country that is without precedent and should be condemned but which escapes his capacity to do, and this is a most egregious abrogation of his responsibility.

What is the latest manifestation of this Prime Minister's incompetent period in office? It's not just the cost of living. It's not just in relation to the way in which they have gone about destroying parts of our economy. That is a very worthy discussion within this parliament, but today we condemn this Prime Minister for the work that he has done to undermine our national security agencies and the work that he has done, the decisions he's taken and the decisions that he hasn't taken which have resulted in an undermining of the security settings in our country.

He was in here yesterday, and he said, 'Well, look, there's nothing to see here because we brought in or we issued visas for 2,900 people, and 1,300 people have come in'—from a war zone controlled by Hamas, a listed terrorist organisation. Can you imagine if John Howard or Kim Beazley or Paul Keating as leaders of parties had advocated bringing in people with affiliations or sympathies to Hamas or to Hizballah or to al-Qaeda or to ISIS or to ISIL? They would have been rightly condemned. Yet this Prime Minister has changed the settings for our security agencies such that they now allow people to come into our country who have sympathies for an organisation listed by this parliament as an organisation of terror.

This Prime Minister is now saying that the bar has been lowered so low that people can come in who have sympathies to the acts that we've spoken about on 7 October, where women were beheaded, people were slaughtered and pregnant women were run down in the streets and the fields, and this Prime Minister says that that's okay. And he comes into this parliament yesterday and tries to say that every person who has come here of the 1,300—on tourist visas, which is without precedent—who hadn't been interviewed face to face and who hadn't been properly screened would be tested and checked by ASIO. That is not true. He misled the parliament. As I said in my motion earlier today, 'it considers that this constitutes a deliberate misleading of the House.' That is the quote from my—

See this speech in context