Labor ‘grub’ Mark Dreyfus opens ugly can of worms

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

In age-old parliamentary terms, Mark Dreyfus was a “grub” on Tuesday when he suggested Peter Dutton’s “silence” on Melbourne’s Nazi protest was allowing “bigotry and hatred” to breed.

The Attorney-General was not only a grub, he was also a political nincompoop who opened a can of Nazi worms that derailed Labor’s winning question time performance and blew back on to Anthony Albanese. Dutton, rightly and genuinely, rebuked Dreyfus, pointed out the Prime Minister had been silent in not making a statement, and challenged them both to propose federal bans on Nazi symbols.

In light of the Aston federal by-election, Dreyfus tried to draw the federal Liberal leader into the mess of the Victorian Liberals’ fight over the expulsion of a state MP who had protested in the same space as a group of black-clad men giving Nazi salutes.

“There is no place in Australian society for public displays of Nazi symbols or the Nazi salute. These are markers of some of the darkest days in world history, of ghettos, of deportations, and mass murder that touched my own family,” Dreyfus rightly declared.

He warned “anti-Semitism is on the rise in Australia, and around the world”, and listed actions and statements by Victorian political leaders with approval.

But then came the grubby, politically stupid bit. He asked as he gestured towards Dutton across the dispatch boxes: “What did we have from those opposite? In particular, their leader, complete silence. We all know that bigotry and hatred breed in silence. What is so hard about this? Who is the Opposition Leader afraid of offending here? This speaks volumes about the leadership qualities of the Leader of the Opposition. And Australians will take note,” Dreyfus intoned with grave condemnation.

Amid interjections, Dutton was given a deserved response pointing to his years of supporting prosecution of neo-Nazi groups, his abhorrence of anti-Semitism and condemnation of the use of Nazi slurs “for political purposes”.

Then he challenged Albanese and Dreyfus to bring in laws to ban Nazi symbols, which he would support, and called on the PM to produce his own statement on the Nazi protest.

Dutton’s point was that if his lack of a statement was bigotry breeding, then where was Albanese’s statement? (After question time, Albanese condemned the protest in a radio interview). It was worse for Dreyfus, who looked isolated, uncomfortable and unpopular as the grubby miscalculation became clear, because during the election campaign, Albanese himself was forced to apologise for using the Nazi “Sieg Heil” call in parliament 20 years ago. When a Labor branch depicted Jewish former treasurer Josh Frydenberg in a Nazi SS uniform and Jewish leaders called for an end to the use of Nazi symbols and language in political debate, Albanese said he “regretted” using “Sieg Heil” during an asylum-seeker debate in 2001.

Dreyfus needs to be careful what worms he turns up when behaving like the proverbial parliamentary grub.