Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by senators today.

I want to try and encapsulate the essence of those questions that were put to Senator Brandis, starting with the A to G—that is, the Attorney-General, obviously. A is for the ABC broadcast, and we know how those people on the other side feel about the ABC. B is for books and, I guess, to be precise, it should be about poetry. C is for citizenship and E is for e-security, and we all remember the metadata and the performance by the Attorney-General with that. F is for funding and the funding for arts, which we know he has cut, and we know about the funding of his books to go into his very expensive bookshelf in his office. And of course all Australians remember that G is for Gillian Triggs. This government's performance in terms of attacking Ms Triggs is well known and has been deplored. The Attorney-General's performance in his personal attacks on the credibility of this public servant has been absolutely deplorable.

We all know that this government is in chaos, but what we are really not quite sure about is whether it is a matter of the ministers in this government being totally incompetent or just untruthful. There are so many examples of how out of touch this government is, and no-one is more out of touch than the Attorney-General. There was his performance at the recently-held estimates, and the way in which he and his department have dealt with the correspondence they received from Man Haron Monis in relation to the siege at the Lindt Cafe; the fact that he waited for over a week before he corrected the public record. This is a man who comes into this chamber day after day and tries to berate the opposition for our term in government.