Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have been reading Enid Blyton's Magic Faraway Tree to my little boy recently. He really likes the Land of Topsy-Turvy. This land is a place where people walk on their hands, they wear hats on their feet—it is a place where everything is upside down. There is also the poem Topsy-Turvy Landby HG Wilkinson:

The people walk upon their heads,

The sea is made of sand,

The children go to school by night,

In Topsy-Turvy Land.

I think we have entered some kind of bizarre political version of topsy-turvy land, because in this topsy-turvy land transparent, open and accountable government means that you keep billboards with the tally of boat arrivals when you are in opposition and then you refuse to disclose any details about boat arrivals when you are a government, even when you are ordered by the Senate to do so. In this bizarre version of topsy-turvy land honest government means making a clear commitment about school funding when you are in opposition in the middle of an election campaign, and when that is over you go back on your word. In this version of topsy-turvy land clear, calm and methodical government means you convene late-night crisis meetings to make sure you can try and clean up the mess that is the fallout from your broken election promises.

In this version of topsy-turvy land your response to a budget emergency is to cut revenues like those provided by the mining tax and the fringe benefits tax on novated car leases. In this version of topsy-turvy land government debt is such a bad thing that one of the first things you try and do is raise the debt ceiling by $200 billion. In topsy-turvy land you show your commitment to science by cutting funding to CSIRO and by not appointing a science minister. In this land you campaign with your daughters to show your strong commitment to women and then you appoint one woman to your cabinet. In political topsy-turvy land you show your commitment to the free market by scrapping a market mechanism to tackle climate change and then you start writing cheques to big polluters. You show your commitment to the free market by floating the idea of nationalising Qantas and continuing big subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

In this version of political topsy-turvy land you are so concerned about people drowning at sea that you force our Navy to engage in risky operations that put their lives at risk. You spend years politicising climate change and then you accuse others of political opportunism when they point out the bleeding obvious, that extreme weather events will get worse if we do not act. In political topsy-turvy land you are so committed to small government, to reducing the influence of state power, that you refuse to allow gay couples to marry. And in this political version of topsy-turvy land being a good Christian means locking up young kids indefinitely in offshore prisons and it means denying a woman and her newborn access to decent medical care.

Some people would use other, less kind, words to describe the behaviour of this government in its first few months, particularly when it comes to the issue of refugees and asylum seekers. They would call them hypocrites, they would call them secretive, they would call them cowardly. Whatever language you want to use, we have entered some sort of bizarre political twilight zone where people walk on their hands and wear hats on their feet.