Attorney General Mark Dreyfus will introduce a general secrecy offence aimed at Commonwealth officers. Photo: Supplied.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says Coalition MPs are practically lining up to apologise after the Opposition attempted to stop him talking about antisemitism in Parliament – but the party’s leaders are not among them.
Mr Dreyfus, who is Jewish, spoke on the Hate Crimes Bill at the beginning of the House of Representatives’ most recent sitting week (Monday 10 February) and condemned the rising antisemitism sentiment in Australia.
“No government has done more to combat the abhorrent and shocking rise in antisemitism than this government…” he said.
“I have stood in the shadow of the main gate at the Auschwitz death camp, the site of a music festival that turned into a bloodbath and a [firebombed] synagogue in my own home …”
At that point Manager of Opposition Business Michael Sukkar – under direction from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton – rose to move a gag motion on the Attorney-General.
Mr Dutton, who has been campaigning on antisemitism in Australia, says the government has not been doing enough to stop it.
So when Mr Dreyfus began to passionately outline what the government was doing about antisemitism, the Opposition Leader didn’t want the nation to hear.
A clearly shocked Mr Dreyfus told Mr Sukkar: “You are disgusting. I do not need the Leader of the Opposition or any of those opposite to tell me what antisemitism is or how seriously I should take it.”
Mr Sukkar nevertheless moved that the “member no longer be heard”. It necessitated a vote that was defeated 91–52.
The country’s most senior Jewish politician resumed his speech.
“I am the son and the grandson of Holocaust survivors. I went to the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz…” he said.
“The place where a million Jews were murdered, a place where my great-grandmother was murdered…
“And I say to members of this House, we have had a wave of antisemitism in this country. Right now, we need bipartisanship.”
Mr Dreyfus described during a media interview on Thursday (20 February) how many Coalition MPs had subsequently apologised to him over leaders’ tactics.
“An extraordinary number of Opposition politicians have actually approached me or contacted me in a range of ways,” he told the ABC.
“I’m not going to make their lives difficult by identifying them. But they saw what happened in Parliament was a mistake and they’ve apologised to me for it.”
Neither Mr Sukkar nor Mr Dutton have apologised.
The Opposition Leader, who described the gag attempt as “proportionate”, used the day after the speech to suggest Mr Dreyfus had been forced to apologise to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for telling Mr Sukkar he was disgusting.
That was nonsense, according to Mr Dreyfus who said Mr Albanese described the gag attempt as “completely unacceptable”.
“I have not had an apology from Michael Sukkar … it was an extraordinary thing to gag,” he said.
“The gag is used very rarely in Parliament. To seek to gag the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, when I’m talking about a subject as serious as this, and a subject as personal and as close to me as this, was wrong.
“And I think everyone in the Opposition realises it, even if not all of them have had the courage or the good grace to apologise.”
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