Wednesday’s Question Time started with one very simple – and direct – question to the Prime Minister by the Opposition Leader.
Can someone who supports Hamas pass ‘s citizenship test?
Anthony Albanese refused to answer the question. He waxed lyrical that it was a divisive question. He chastised the Opposition Leader for asking it.
Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. But he wouldn’t give a straight answer to a pretty simple question.
How can an n Prime Minister not answer whether or not a Hamas sympathiser should pass the test to become a citizen?
Surely the answer is no! Maybe not.
Next the Immigration Minister, Tony Burke, was asked a similarly direct question: Has anyone in his electorate lobbied him for a visa from the Gaza war zone?
Before the minister had the chance to refuse to answer the question – which is exactly what he eventually did – the PM tried to intervene with a point of order designed to rule it out of order.
To his credit the Labor Speaker wouldn’t let that happen, finding a way around the attempted blockade. It was an act of true Speaker independence worthy of applause. After which Burke refused to answer the question anyway.
The new immigration minister similarly refused to answer whether or not anyone granted a visa from the Middle East war zone has not undergone an ASIO security check.
While Labor might not like these questions, and some may consider them deliberately divisive, they are reasonable enough questions ns might like to know the answers to.
Even if they are uncomfortable questions for a Labor Party looking to walk a delicate balance between retaining mainstream electoral support and holding onto support in inner city electorates and amongst Muslim communities that might have a certain sympathy for the plight of Palestine and even Hamas.
But answering difficult questions is the job of leaders. And that is what Question Time is supposed to be all about. In theory at least.
In practice it is more often a theatre of the absurd: a platform for ministers to get asked questions by their own side they wrote themselves and distributed to the backbench to ask.
Today was no exception.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers took an early one, telling the backbencher who is retiring that her question was a clear example of why she will be missed after politics.
Really? Chalmers thinks her ability to parrot a question he handed her shortly before walking into the chamber sums up her contribution to public life?
It would be a brilliant insult if he meant it that way. Maybe he did. It’s not like he’ll need her vote down the track when Chalmers inevitably decides to make a tilt at the Labor leadership in the next parliament or the one after that.
The theatre of the absurd continued when Labor’s Peter Khalil stood up to ask his own, handed out Dorothy Dixer question.
Khalil, recently appointed as the government’s special envoy for social cohesion, followed shortly after one of the exchanges on immigration that Labor complained the Coalition is using to stoke divisions.
But the special envoy for social cohesion wasn’t going there, as his new role might have lent itself to. Instead he dutifully asked the question handed to him – on childcare.
Just when you thought the day’s question time could descend even further the former immigration minister, Andrew Giles, was wheeled out to answer a Dixer in his new skills portfolio.
The question and the answer were unremarkable, but at least Giles didn’t trip over his own incompetence – a welcome change from his bumbling ways before being dumped from the immigration portfolio at the reshuffle a fortnight ago.