Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Greens will be supporting this disallowance motion for a range of reasons, primarily because the legal services direction is contrary to the rule of law in that it seeks to set the Attorney-General up as a gatekeeper to the Solicitor-General and because the Attorney-General misled the Senate in the material he provided to this chamber with respect to the legal services direction. It is worth pointing out that the Attorney-General is a serial misleader of the Commonwealth parliament. He misleads on every day that he is asked about migration matters in this place when he claims that not one person has died at sea under Operation Sovereign Borders, when he cannot possibly make that claim. He misleads when he claims that no children are currently in detention, when in fact there are children in detention on Nauru as we have this debate today. Of course, he misleads the Senate when he claims to have consulted with the Solicitor-General on the legal services direction, when in fact the Solicitor-General himself made it very clear in his evidence to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee that he had not been consulted. So this is an Attorney-General who is renowned for his appalling failures and lapses of judgement, and this legal services direction constitutes yet another appalling failure of judgement.