MOTIONS

Mr TED O'BRIEN (Fairfax) (09:11): I second the motion, and I call on the Prime Minister to act in the national interest and not his personal interest. The Australia-Japanese relationship is a special strategic partnership. I fear that the longer this saga goes on, the greater we risk damage to that relationship and to a people who we call friends, a people who are themselves deeply respectful.

This year, we mark 50 years of a treaty of friendship and collaboration between Australia and Japan. Right now, we should be celebrating trust between the two countries. We should be talking optimistically about deepening that relationship even further for another 50 years and more.

Ultimately, trust is the currency of diplomacy, yet what we see, with an apparent leaking of a confidential diplomatic note, is a breach of trust. That is unacceptable. We are a serious nation that should be governed by serious people, yet what we have here is a cheap and vulgar podcast comment from the Prime Minister morphing into an issue that compromises our national interests.

Just as I call for the Prime Minister to act in the national interest and not his personal interest, I call on the Foreign minister to remember that her responsibility is to be Australia's chief diplomat and not the Prime Minister's chief apologist. This is utterly unacceptable. It is becoming a national embarrassment.

To hear that there has been a report on the Prime Minister's inappropriate comments in the Japan Times only worsens this, and then the response from the Prime Minister and his ministers to be one of defending the indefensible has only worsened the situation. The Leader of the Opposition was right to ask the shadow minister for defence and me, as the shadow minister for foreign affairs, to refer this to the Australian Federal Police.

We cannot have a situation where foreign governments do not know if the Australian government can be trusted with confidential diplomatic notes. We call on the AFP to investigate. The Prime Minister needs to be held to his own standards, in addition to the standard he outlaid, which the Leader of the Opposition mentioned, when the Prime Minister, in 2022, on dealing with foreign governments, said: Well, one of the things I will do and a part of keeping faith is keeping private conversations private.

Let me also mention a few other things he said. On the first day of the election campaign in 2022, the now prime minister said: But when I make a mistake, I'll fess up to it, and I'll set about correcting that mistake. He said: I won't blame someone else, I'll accept responsibility.

That's what leaders do. Prime Minister, we ask you, for the sake of our nation, for the sake of our relationship with Japan, please be a leader: come into this House and make an apology.