MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator CASH (Western Australia—Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (15:52): I move: That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency: The Prime Minister's repeated failure to take responsibility for his crude and inappropriate conduct, his willingness to rely on senior female ministers making excuses for his behaviour, his habit of denying, minimising or rewriting the truth when caught out, and the growing pattern of broken promises, false assurances and misleading statements that has destroyed Australians' trust in his word.
This motion goes to the heart of Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister of Australia—his character; his crude and inappropriate conduct but, worse than that, his refusal to take responsibility for it and, sadly, his willingness to rely on senior female ministers in his government to continue to make excuses for that crude and inappropriate behaviour; his habit of denying, minimising or rewriting the truth when caught out; and, sadly for the Australian people, the growing list of broken promises and false assurances that have destroyed any trust in his word.
This is not just one incident; this is now a pattern of behaviour. Despite what he said, the Prime Minister chose to bring the Bush Deep podcast into the Lodge. According to the host of the podcast, Nikki Osborne, this was personal.
She says she contacted the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, directly through his Instagram after noticing that he followed her account. He responded. He accepted the invitation to appear on this podcast, and she says he knew the show and he knew exactly what he was agreeing to.
So I say to the Prime Minister: spare Australians the pretence that this was some media ambush. This was no ambush. This was a booking made by the Prime Minister which he personally embraced.
What sort of program was it? You just needed to read Chris Kenny on the weekend; he documented it. Only weeks earlier, the same podcast the Prime Minister personally accepted an invitation to go on featured an adult content creator discussing in graphic sexual detail an encounter involving hundreds of men while the host re-enacted aspects of what was being described.
That was publicly available. That was the program. So the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, either knew what he was walking into—and he thought it was appropriate for the Prime Minister of Australia to do such a podcast—or his office failed to do the most basic of due diligence.
Take your pick because, quite frankly, neither says anything good about his judgement. Then, sadly, he joined in juvenile discussion involving accomplished Australian women and made crude remarks involving Japan's first female prime minister. They were choices.
They were Anthony Albanese's choices. They were bad choices. And they were grubby choices.
When the backlash came as it did, did he take responsibility? Did he say: 'Mea culpa. I am sorry, I got it wrong, I apologise'?
No, he did not. Instead, senior Labor women went out and defended him, even going to the extent of denying that those vile, crude and disgusting remarks were sexist or disrespectful. These are the same people who delight in lecturing everybody else about respect, but when Anthony Albanese is the man under scrutiny, suddenly those standards disappear.
Labor's respect agenda apparently has one giant exception: Anthony Albanese. This goes to the broader credibility problem that the Prime Minister now faces. As I said, it is now a pattern of behaviour.
Before the election, what does he rule out over 50 times? Changes to negative gearing and changes to capital gains—to quote the Prime Minister, as he snapped at a reporter, 'For the 50th time'. That's 50 times, in his own words, and 50 assurances Labor would not change negative gearing or capital gains, and the Australian people voted on that.
Then, of course, after the election, he merely said, 'Guess what? Despite those 50 assurances, I changed my mind.' Well, quite frankly, the problem he now has is: why would anyone now believe assurance No. 51? Australians know the pattern: poor judgement, no responsibility, denial, minimisation, broken promises and somebody else left to clean up the mess afterwards.
Anthony Albanese's problem is no longer simply that Australians disagree with him; it's that they have no reason— (Time expired)