Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications. Under broadcasting licences issued by the Commonwealth, last year Australian television stations relayed footage of an interview the Minister for Communications did on the Alan Jones program. These broadcasts asserted that the minister said:

I support unreservedly and wholeheartedly every element in the Budget. Every single one.

Minister, were these broadcasts accurate and appropriate uses of the broadcasting licences?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have to compliment the honourable member on that rather elaborate way he has tried to make this question relevant to my portfolio. But of course every single member of the government supported every element in the budget—of course. We are a united government. The Labor Party make the great mistake of seeing their opponents through the prism of their own disunity, of imagining that we are as fractured and faction ridden as them, of imagining that we have dissension in our ranks in the way they do in the Labor Party.

I see the smiling opposition leader. This is the hero of the Hoang Hau lazy Susan. There he was, turning the table on his leader. He has not only deposed one leader; he has deposed two. He had second thoughts.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A second course!

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A second course—the Prime Minister is quite right. The first course was Rudd, the second course was Gillard, and then he went back to the first course. Well, you can do that at a Vietnamese restaurant, I suppose. You can just go back to the beginning of the menu.

But really the truth of the matter is interviews with Alan Jones are always entertaining. He is a very colourful interviewer and I was delighted to see parts of that interview broadcast. It was a colourful one and one where each of us stood our ground. You could say of Mr Jones, and I think he would probably say it of me, that we are often wrong but never in doubt. It is important to stand up to him and to not be bullied by him. I must say that over the years the great mistake that politicians have made—including, the member for Watson knows, a Labor Premier of New South Wales—is to allow yourself to be bullied by the media. It is absolutely vital to win the respect of the public and indeed of the media itself, to stand your ground, stand up for what you believe in and not be bullied into an echo chamber. That is the critical—

Mr Shorten interjecting—

'Climate change,' says the Leader of the Opposition. This is the man that persuaded Kevin Rudd not to go to a double dissolution. This is the man that led Kevin Rudd over the cliff into an abyss, where he then stabbed him in the back. You have no credibility on integrity, Leader of the Opposition.