Labor says security agencies warned Liberals it would be 'unwise' to preselect Gladys Liu – politics live
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Version 8 of 14. It’s rare that Andrew Bolt gets a guernsey in these pages, but given his interview with Gladys Liu gave the whole issue legs, I’ll include part of his response to Scott Morrison’s press conference: There is 1.2 million Australians of Chinese heritage in this country. This has a very grubby undertone in terms of the smear that is being placed on Gladys Liu and I think people should reflect very carefully in the way they have sought to attack Gladys over this matter and the broader smear that I think is implied in that to over more than one million Australians. Extraordinary. Are the dictators in Beijing now writing Morrison’s lines? Morrison is offensive not just to everyone asking legitimate questions about Liu’s associations and untruths, from Asio to Labor, and including many journalists. It is also grossly offensive to every Chinese-Australian and every democracy dissident in China and Hong Kong. Morrison is in effect suggesting that criticism of someone close to China’s Communist party is a criticism of every Chinese man and woman. As I said, Beijing couldn’t have put that lie better than did Morrison today.” People would still need to be playing it, for this to be a thing. Nick McKim is questioning whether the creators of Pokemon Go could be liable under the 'vegan terrorists' bill because it might incite people onto agricultural land. #auspol Bridget McKenzie is now talking on this bill, reminding me why I very rarely watch the Senate. Labor is not backing down on the Gladys Liu issue. Penny Wong and Mark Dreyfus have just sent out this press release: Today there are extraordinary reports that senior Liberals were warned by security agencies that concerns about Gladys Liu’s links to the Chinese Communist party made it ‘unwise’ to preselect her. One Government MP is quoted: ‘There should have been concerns when she was being chosen to stand as a candidate and I believe those concerns were ignored.’ These reports raise serious questions as to whether the prime minister and the Liberal party put winning marginal seats ahead of Australia’s national security. This goes far beyond whether an interview was clumsy. It goes directly to the national interest. In light of these reports, the prime minister must urgently demonstrate to the Australian people what steps he took to ensure that Gladys Liu is in fact a fit and proper person to sit in the Australian parliament. It is in the interests of Chinese-Australian communities and our inclusive democracy for these specific concerns to be addressed. The only person linking these specific and serious concerns about Ms Liu to the entire Chinese-Australian population is Scott Morrison and he should stop. All parliamentarians must be able to provide assurance that they have no conflict of interest in serving the Australian people.” In the Senate the government has lobbed in a last minute amendment to the so-called vegan terrorist bill. The amendment adds wood processing- and wood fibre-processing facilities to the definition of primary production businesses protected by the laws criminalising social media posts that incite trespass, a demand of the forestry industry that increases its remit beyond food production. On Tuesday the Labor caucus agreed to seek to amend the bill to address numerous concerns raised by Kim Carr in an inquiry examining it but – if these failed – ultimately to support it. The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese ,told MPs that “vegan terrorists” were not part of Labor’s constituency but trade unions were. This new amendment could pose a difficulty for Labor because it didn’t go through caucus and expands the bill’s remit to deterring organisation of environmental protests generally, not just those that could cause biosecurity concerns. Tim Beshara, federal policy director of The Wilderness Society, has responded to the new amendment: “This minute to midnight amendment makes clear that the government’s intentions with this bill is to constrain and intimidate groups it disagrees with. “It’s clear now, this bill was never about farmers, biosecurity and animal welfare, it was simply an identity politics crusade that has now been broadened from targeting activist vegans to targeting conservationists. Soon every group the government disagrees with will be on this list. “When Labor signed off on passing this bill did that include the amendment targeting conservationists too? Are they onside with the government’s legal intimidation of the people who care about the environment?” Joel Fitzgibbon and Michael McCormack have “cuddled” in front of the cameras after yesterday’s tantrums. In unrelated news, water has been discovered on a planet with earth-like temperatures, if you are looking for a change. And for those who missed it, here is the main message from Scott Morrison and his MPs Scott Morrison says the Gladys Liu motion has “grubby undertones”. He refuses to come out and label it as racism when asked but says the “1.2 million Chinese Australians get the point”. pic.twitter.com/dNy4Nfbltf The PMO has put out the transcript to the press conference Scott Morrison held. You may have seen a note that Morrison did not address this first part of the ABC’s Andrew Probyn’s question: Firstly, have you inquired with Gladys Liu as to the nature of her work with the Chinese Consulate down in Melbourne? And secondly, what advice, if any, have you received from security agencies about Gladys Liu’s background or the people with whom she associated? There was as follow up: AP: What of my first question about the work with the Chinese Consulate? Morrison: There is no matter before me that would give me concern. Draft laws giving federal police more power to conduct identity checks at Australian airports are a step closer to being rubber-stamped, AAP reports. “The proposal passed through the lower house on Thursday with shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, pleased the legislation had been amended in line with recommendations from parliament’s intelligence and security committee,” it said. “The recommendations include requiring police to publicly report how many times the powers are used and how many people miss flights as a consequence.” Kristina Keneally, in an interview with ABC RN last week, raised the point that the Biloela family debate was straying into “anchor baby” territory: This is an importation, quite frankly, of an American debate about so-called anchor babies, and the law is very different in the United States where citizenship is accorded to anybody born on American soil. That is not the law in Australia so it’s an importation of that debate. No. The issue here, I would say, is that the Biloela community, Australians, have embraced this family, want them to be part of their community, have integrated them into the fabric of their community. It’s not simply the act of having a child.” Also in the Senate, Kristina Keneally has just had this motion passed: I give notice that, on the next day of sitting, I shall move that: 1) The Senate notes that: a. Paladin – the small company registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island which was awarded a $523m contract without a proper tender process – has been fined over one thousand times in eighteen months for failing to provide contracted services. b. The Minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs, Minister Cash, told the Senate on Tuesday 10 September 2019 that these fines “often related to relatively minor administrative failures”. c. Documents produced under order of the Senate revealed that the total abatement could have totalled $11 million, if not for monthly penalty limits. 2) There be laid on the table by the Minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs, by no later than 12:20pm on 16 September 2019: a. An unredacted copy of each Performance Management Report, which details the aforementioned fines, relating to Paladin’s contract to provide services on Manus Island. b. A copy of the full report prepared by the Independent Health Advice Panel for the Second Quarter of 2019 in accordance with Section 199E of the Migration Act 1958. Which means the un-redacted Paladin documents and the full independent health panel report on medevac has to be tabled in parliament by Monday lunchtime. Over in the Senate Govt & ALP have just voted together to limit the time of the inquiry into drug testing of income support recipients, the inquiry has to report 10 Oct. They have also limited the time for inquiry into the extension of cashless debit card reporting 7 Nov Peter Dutton has phoned in for his regular love in with Ray Hadley on 2GB. They are still really cool friends, yadda, yadda, yadda. But then the home affairs minister gets into the Tamil family from Biloela. And, well, Dutton is going a new direction on this now. And it’s not the direction Michelle Obama recommends we all take. He says the family’s case has cost taxpayers “literally millions of dollars”. “The matter has been to the high court. These people came by boat. It’s been made clear to them at every turn that they were not going to stay in Australia and they still had children. We see that overseas in other countries, anchor babies so-called: the emotion of trying to leverage a migration outcome based on the children and they claim they have new grounds to test with the federal court in Victoria. “... I regret to say I don’t think this will be dealt with quickly. I think it will go on now for potentially a couple of months because lawyers will try and delay and that is part of a tactic. They think if they delay they can keep the pressure on the government and we’ll change our mind in relation to this case.” Hadley says his listeners in Biloela don’t agree with the “left-wing advocates in the southern part of the continent”. The assistant minister for superannuation and financial services, Jane Hume, has launched the Australian financial complaints authority roadshow in Canberra, along with its chair, Helen Coonan. Since December the authority – the “one-stop-shop” financial complaints body established by the Turnbull government when it was avoiding calling a banking royal commission – has received 60,000 complaints and resolved 73% of them, resulting in $144.7m of compensation being paid. At a doorstop, Hume said that rather than being surprised by the number of complaints she is surprised there aren’t more, and the roadshow will lift the authority’s profile so disgruntled customers know where to go. Hume also confirmed that not only is it still government policy to have an amnesty for employers who fail to pay superannuation but we should expect fresh legislation to do so “imminently”. Hume: “It is still our plan to go ahead with that superannuation guarantee amnesty that will allow companies that have inadvertently not paid the correct amount of superannuation to come forward to the tax office ... to make sure we can reunite as many people as possible with superannuation they haven’t been paid.” “Grubby smear” and “clumsy interview” is the official government line when it comes to Gladys Liu. Jane Hume is repeating it on Sky. Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, just told an off-the-record Australian Industry Group gathering at parliament that Australia is doing “extremely well” on its emissions reduction task. Taylor cited as evidence that Australia is expected to exceed its 2020 target by 367m tonnes but strangely neglected to mention that Australia’s emissions are at a record high and still rising. In the context of the fact Scott Morrison won’t attend the UN climate summit because Australia has no new emissions reduction goals to unveil, Taylor said that Australia – unlike other countries – does not “lecture” at these international events. It just gets on and “achieves”. The rest of the speech rehearsed facts about strong investment in renewables in 2018, although as Katharine Murphy has reported this is set to drop off a cliff in 2020 because of a lack of certainty after the renewable energy target expires. This bullish view of the renewables scene was rebutted thoroughly by Labor’s Mark Butler and the Greens Richard Di Natale at a Clean Energy Council event on Wednesday night, both of whom noted the success was despite rather than because of Coalition government policy. But at the AIG event Taylor was followed by the immigration minister, David Coleman, so it seems the business types wanted to hear a lot more from the re-elected Coalition than a bit of back and forth on what we’re doing for the planet. On the British-Australian bloggers who have been detained in Iran, named as Jolie King and Mark Firkin, Scott Morrison said: I refer to the comments made by the foreign [affairs] minister. These are always very sensitive cases. They are never issues that are addressed well by offering public commentary on them and I note that in at least one of these cases that is a view that has been expressed by family members. “We will continue to pursue these matters in the interests of the Australians at the centre of these cases and we will do that carefully and in close consultation through our officials who have been part of this process now for some time. I will respect the wishes of the family and I will respect the best interests of those citizens.” Question: [I’ve been] involved in the reporting on [these issues] for the last four years. A lot of that involves China and we have been accused of racism from start to the finish of that. Clearly that is a concern the government has. How do you propose we report about this if it [does] involve some people who are members of the Chinese-Australian community? Morrison: What I think the problem here is Gladys Liu has given a clumsy interview. That is all that’s happened here. There is no credible suggestion of any inappropriate behaviour in relation to Gladys Liu. What we’re left with is just a grubby smear by the Labor party who is in one of their most desperate hours unable to explain their position on anything and so they have gone after a Chinese-Australian woman, the first so elected in this parliament. They should be celebrating their election, not attacking it. Question: You mentioned earlier some local Chinese community groups of which Ms Liu seems to have been a member. What concerns do you have about the China Overseas Exchange Association? It is not a local Chinese community group but an organ of the communist party of China. Morrison: We are looking at all these issues carefully in terms of the impact on Australia’s interests and will take whatever action we have to ensure Australia’s interests. |