Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset I was going to offer some commentary about what happened in question time. I was distracted slightly by Senator Canavan's outline of Marxist principles in his response. It always takes a former student Trot to clearly—

Well-read on these questions and probably has copies of the Australian and the Green Left Weekly in equal measure arriving in his office. There's the extraordinary hypocrisy of this assault on government funding for the Environmental Defenders Office. That there's a series of publicly funded extremists over there worrying about publicly funded radical action is a pretty extraordinary prospect.

We're approaching the halfway point of the last sitting fortnight. I'll tell you what we do know about this opposition and their line of questions this year. Instead of reflecting on the election results, considering their own political position and tacking back to the centre of Australian politics, where Australians want to see the political debate focused on the issues that matter for Australians, they have been baking in a hard-right extremist agenda and the most extreme hard-right leader of the Liberal Party in its history, Mr Dutton. That is what has happened here. It's all negative. It's all shouty. It's all angry. There are no solutions. There is no constructive approach to any of the problems that Australian families or the country are facing. It is hyperpartisan. It takes a link out of the sort of mouth-breathing extremist fringe of United States politics and the sort of face-to-camera pieces for social media that some of these characters indulge in.

What Australians want from political leaders is consistency. Minister Watt pointed out the reports in the media about the letter Senator Smith wrote on behalf of a person who was convicted of a sexual offence in relation to a child.

Letters from senators carry weight, because of their position. A sense of clarify about these kinds of offences is important. That's not the point. The point is: what has Mr Dutton's approach to these questions been? Well, at every chance that he gets he shouts, 'Paedophile, murderers, rapists.' But, when it comes to a letter written by one of his own senators in support of a person who very much fits that criminal profile, what do we hear from the Leader of the Opposition? Silence. You could hear a pin drop. When it's in his political interests, Mr Dutton shouts, 'Paedophile, rapists, murderer.' All of these people, by the way, have had to be released into the community because of his broken, dud legislation that he took no action to resolve. Always the tough talk but never the tough action.

For Mr Dutton it gets worse. When the then New South Wales opposition leader Judi McKay, who's a very good person, made an error that cost her the leadership of the New South Wales Labor Party and wrote a much less focused and more innocuous letter in relation to a person who'd committed similar offences, what did Mr Dutton say? He said her position was completely untenable. 'She's in big trouble and she is digging furiously. How many other criminals has she supported?' He is a tough-talking blowhard when it comes to people that he opposes, but he's soft and quiet when it comes to the same things happening on his own side. And he was nowhere to be seen when his dud legislation put the government in the position that it's been in.