Australia's best responds - Laura Tingle statement, page-107

Here's why she said it

Panellist Niki Savva had quoted those points Mr Dutton had made about too many migrants meaning things like it was too hard to buy a house, get in to see your GP, or get into childcare, and noted that the Opposition Leader seemed to bring everything back to immigration.

In agreeing with that observation, based on Mr Dutton's own quotes, I once again raised the risks for the political debate of a major political leader doing this, which I truncated as "everything that's going wrong in this country is because of migrants".

That was simply a result of trying to summarise a point in a much less structured forum and was not intended to imply he had said that verbatim. If I had been speaking on an ABC platform, or not in a five-way discussion, I would have provided all that context, as I do in my stories for the ABC.

I did indeed make the observation on Sunday that we are a racist country, in the context of a discussion about the political prospects ahead. I wasn't saying every Australian is a racist. But we clearly have an issue with racism. For some months now, for example, The Australian newspaper has been devoting considerable space to its alarm about a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia