George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy President, when I hear government ministers, from the Prime Minister to Senator Wong and others, say the opposition is in the gutter, I am reminded of the late President Richard Nixon, who said the same thing. He used the same words about his accusers during the course of the Watergate affair. It is the defence of the scoundrel to say that the accuser is in the gutter. I remember the late Creighton Burns, one of the great giants of Australian journalism, who exposed during a previous Labor government—the government of Gough Whitlam—the foreign loans affair. He was accused of being in the gutter and accused of muckraking, and he said famously: 'If there's muck, let's rake it; that's what journalists do.'