Albo has no "ticker"PVO: Can a Hamas supporter come to Australia? Albo giveshis answer
Story by Peter van Onselen, Political Editor for Daily Mail Australia
• 23h • 3 min read
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 Australia's character 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 Australian 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 Australians 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.
