Anthony Albanese stands accused of deliberately misleading the parliament and misrepresenting the director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, to protect Labor’s handling of visa security for Gazans and covering for his own mistakes.
In the current context of heightened social division, raised terror threats after the Hamas attack on Israel, protests and violent attacks on MPs’ offices, there can hardly be a graver allegation to make against the Prime Minister.
Yet, a rattled and uncertain Albanese, shuffling his papers and turning to nasty personal attacks on the Opposition Leader, left the parliamentary chamber on Thursday afternoon, leaving a junior minister to respond to the accusations that he had “deliberately twisted” the words of the ASIO director-general to cover for gaps in the security vetting of people coming from the radicalised, war-torn Gaza zone and to cover for his own mistakes.
After a week of dominating the parliament with questions about the security checks for the almost 3000 people in Gaza given visas since the Hamas attacks on October 7, Peter Dutton pounced with an epic parliamentary claim accusing Albanese of deliberately misleading the parliament by misrepresenting what Burgess had said last Sunday on the ABC Insiders program about ASIO’s role in vetting the visas and the checking of each applicant.
Under fire, looking uneasy and clearly either not across the detail or unable to supply the detail, Albanese defended claims he had made about ASIO being involved in all visa applications by quoting Burgess from Sunday as follows: “If they’ve been issued a visa they’ve gone through the process. They’re referred to my organisation and ASIO does its thing.”
But the exact Burgess quote from Sunday was: “If they’ve been issued a visa they’ve gone through the process. Part of the process is, where criteria are hit, they’re referred to my organisation and ASIO does its thing”.
The key omission from the middle of the sentence is “where criteria are hit”.
This is a vital difference and changes the entire point of Burgess’s statement.
By saying publicly that ASIO was part of the process “where criteria are hit”, the ASIO director-general was making it clear that ASIO was only involved in an application if a criteria – such as a name on a terror watch list – was “hit”.
Yet Albanese had suggested on Wednesday that ASIO was involved in all Gaza visa applications and Thursday’s quote – absent the highly significant qualification – supported that interpretation.
This was a significant omission from the middle of a statement and led Dutton to move a serious motion condemning the Prime Minister and accusing him of both being at odds with the ASIO boss and twisting his words.
At the end of the parliamentary week, Labor and Albanese where they were before the winter break – tied in knots over visas.
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