Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by Senators Collins and Singh today relating to data retention and to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

Senator Brandis has made it very clear today that it is orthodox cabinet process for the leader to override the Attorney-General on his signature policy and to leave it until right at the last minute to tell the Attorney-General he is doing so. We all know that Senator Brandis has staked his career and his 'freedom agenda' on this particular signature policy, so what did he find to say when he was confronted with this reality—that the Prime Minister had rolled him on his signature policy? On Sky News on 6 August, Senator Brandis said:

Well you know what this business is like … you win a few, you lose a few.

What has Senator Brandis won? In his almost 12 months in the role of Attorney-General for this country he has won nothing. On the other hand, what has he lost? He has lost his credibility, he has lost all respect and he has been completely rolled by the Prime Minister on a signature policy that he had staked his career as Attorney-General on. He lost all that on one of his first pieces of legislative reform, a favour that he wanted to do for his friends in the IPA and for his friend—or the Prime Minister's friend—Andrew Bolt.

One of the chief duties of a politician and of a legislator is to explain one's program and to persuade the public about its value in that constant battle of ideas. So how has the Attorney-General fared in this endeavour? What is his record of victory in that marketplace of ideas? Has he demonstrated the levels of competence in public life that are the basic requirement of the political trade and, indeed, that of an Attorney-General. Let us turn to that first signature policy, a key reform, which, in many ways, Senator Brandis very much staked his career on: the repeal and removal of protections against racist hate speech in section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

For many people, this may not seem a worthy goal, but for Senator Brandis and his ideological gang, including the IPA, it certainly was. How did he proceed in the implementation of it? There is no doubt that, on that first question of explaining what he was doing to the Australian people, he had had some measure of success in the end. For Senator Brandis, the primary right that needed to be defended was, as he so clearly explained, the right for bigots to be bigots. After this statement, it became very clear what he intended. He had explained himself and his program; but, after their understanding of that explanation, the community issued a resounding rejection of it.

He had failed in that other important test—that of persuasion. He had completely failed it. There were some 5,000 submissions on his flawed consultation process and the majority of them were a complete and utter rejection of what Senator Brandis highlighted as his signature policy. Why? Because we know what Senator Brandis was trying to do in his freedom agenda: he was trying to allow the rights of bigots to have more precedence in this country than the rights of victims of racist hate speech. So he fell very fast and hard on that first hurdle—the hurdle of persuasion.

But then in the most recent foray of his political endeavours, he has not even been able to reach the second hurdle. Anybody who watched Senator Brandis attempt to explain metadata on Sky News might be tempted to conclude that he has never actually used the World Wide Web or been familiar with the difference between an IP address and a website name. We all know that Senator Brandis likes spending taxpayers' money on books and expensive bookshelves, so my advice to Senator Brandis is that maybe he should pick himself up a copy of the 'dummies guide to the internet', and then perhaps he will not need the communications minister to clean up his mess. Maybe he should recognise that his embarrassing performance in that regard and, indeed, his embarrassing performance in relation to racial hate speech were a rejection of his role as an Attorney-General. (Time expired)