Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

There are two words I have had to look up on my iPad today. The first is 'lickspittle' in the context of the tax debate; I worked out what that was. I thought it sounded pretty rude, but it was not quite as rude as it sounded. And I had to look up 'parsing', on which Wikipedia kindly says:

Parsing or syntactic analysis is the process of analysing a string of symbols, either in natural language or in computer languages, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part (of speech).

And I thought it was a garnish! I suggest to you that there is no parsing here. The fact is that this goes much broader than the people of Australia were told. What concerns me is that two people involved in either exposing or, for one of them, representing someone who has arguably exposed one of the biggest spy scandals in this country in a generation, if not longer, could face having their citizenship stripped because of this. I cannot put it any higher. This seems to have gone beyond this. This was a bill presented to the people of Australia about terrorism, but instead other provisions that relate ostensibly to espionage could include this. Attorney, I am grateful for your responses. I do not think I can take it much further.