John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

) ( After such a long time struggling to become a cabinet minister, of course Senator Brandis must have been delighted to have been appointed as our Attorney-General. As all of us in this place know, Senator Brandis has an absolutely towering view of his own capacity and his own importance. He certainly convinced a lot of us of his potential, and he had only really been stymied by former Prime Minister Howard, who he had allegedly described as a lying rodent but defended himself by saying he only called him a rodent. When Senator Brandis was elevated to cabinet, many of us, myself included, thought he would make a pretty reasonable job of it. I said something very positive in The Sydney Morning Herald about him last July:

There is no doubt George is a capable and effective politician. He's one of the Liberals' best, but he does take himself very seriously at times.

I got the last bit right but I got the rest of it quite wrong —Senator Brandis has been a complete disappointment. He has made an absolutely, utterly, ham-fisted botch of being Attorney-General of Australia. For someone who is so full of himself, it must have been a truly terrible revelation for him to have come face to face with the fact that he is just not up to the job. He does not understand the detail of the legislation that he is responsible for. Take mandatory metadata retention. The Attorney-General does not even know what it is that his legislation would make ISPs retain. That is hardly a surprise, seeing as he does not seem to understand at all how the internet works. He said that what people were viewing on the internet would not be included but that the web address they communicated to would be. Of course it would have been better for the Attorney to consult with the communications minister, who knows something about the internet, but the communications minister had to learn about what the government was up to in The Daily Telegraph. This was excruciatingly humiliating for Senator Brandis, and that interview he did on Sky News was so bad, he was so out of his depth, that even members of the Labor Party told me they felt sorry for him. I did not share their view, but it was certainly extraordinary.

The U-turn on 18C reforms will always be an unforgettable legacy of this Attorney-General. An exposure draft on that was released without even checking with the cabinet—a disaster of a draft, made worse by Senator Brandis's public admission in this chamber that it was a licence for bigotry: 'People have the right to be bigots,' he said. Then, on 4 August, he was telling the public via Peter van Onselen that he still wanted to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, but on 5 August he was standing next to Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, who dumped him and his proposal. But he claims today that that is orthodox cabinet process. I say very generously to Senator Brandis, 'George, you've really got to lift your game. You are embarrassing yourself, you are embarrassing your party.' It is a fact of life that Senator Brandis is nowhere near as good as he thinks he is, as Senator Williams knows. George Brandis should stop being a complete clown. That is what the public think about him. He should step up or step down. (Time expired)