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

Well, what an extraordinary performance! It really sits on top of a series of days of overreach, with the Liberals and Nationals establishing that they are not up to the job in national security terms. They are not up to the job, out of their depth and unable to conduct themselves like adults. They have lost the sense of perspective of putting the country's interests first, rather than trying to go straight to TikTok, which is exactly what Senator Paterson was there trying to do, with his pretend, faux seriousness, looking straight into the camera, trying to confect this idea. This group over here say that they are big on national security, but they performed so poorly as a government that they isolated Australia on the national stage and made us weaker. The Morrison government made us weaker, less secure and less safe, particularly in the Pacific—but no more so than Mr Dutton, who insulted Pacific states and Pacific leaders when the veil was taken off, when he wasn't performing and he thought he wasn't on camera. He promised Ms Queenie or whatever her name was, the immigration star, that we would be back to the $5 million visas, which were rorted systematically by criminals and money launderers when he was the immigration minister.

So what do we have? This show, all blowhard and noise, here on 'overreach Wednesday', when they were talking about social cohesion and protecting the interests of the Australian Jewish community, although just a few years ago Senator Cash and some of these other characters were cheering Senator Brandis on when he said, 'People do have a right to be bigots, you know.' They are utterly inconsistent, utterly juvenile and unfit to play a serious role in national security terms.

What sits underneath that? Why are there all these questions about who knew what when, when they know that is a matter for the security agencies and no government worth its salt would do anything different? What sits underneath that assertion, apart from a venal sense of partisan self-interest? It's a smug sense of entitlement. They can't imagine that their own sense of entitlement is the only thing that drives them forward on these questions.

This is a hopeless stunt. It shows why they are not fit for the job or up to the task and why they are out of their depth on national security questions. It will happen again. It will happen over and over again this week—the confected outrage, the blowhard activity and all of the carry-on. We'd rather get on to listening to what you geniuses have to say in the debate on motions to take note of answers, but we'll see how we go.