From @Tony_Burke {worst}
1. This is very telling. Scott Morrison isn’t out spruiking his industrial relations changes. He isn’t making the case for them. He isn’t even defending them in the Parliament. Instead - bizarrely - he’s pretending they don’t exist.

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The Coalition’s slide into Trumpian black-is-white up-is-down post-truth politics continues.

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2. Christian Porter is playing the same denial game. On Thursday Anthony pointed to the exact part of their IR Bill that allows for pay cuts. Porter then stood up, read out the first three words of the clause and pretended the rest didn’t exist

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. It was only after Albo read out the clause word for word that Porter conceded: “I see what the member is getting at there.” But he then tried to claim that the government’s amendment was precisely the same as previous Labor legislation.

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It’s absolutely not - and if it was exactly the same it wouldn’t be an amendment, would it?

3. You probably would have seen Scott Morrison refuse to answer questions in press conferences. He just arrogantly dismisses questions he doesn’t like and moves on. What you might not know is he’s doing something similar in Question Time.

More than any other Prime Minister I can remember he’s just shamelessly refusing to even try and respond to the questions we ask him.

Rather he just flicks the question to his ministers because he doesn’t want to take any responsibility for his government’s actions, policies and scandals. Gutless.

4. Just a few minutes before Josh was inadvertently honest he’d been flagrantly inventing things so let’s not give him too much credit. In answer to a question from his own side he suddenly declared “I take the interjections from those opposite!”

The only problem was there hadn’t been any interjections. We were all sitting there quiet as church mice. Speaker Tony Smith had to intervene to stop Josh’s ridiculous theatrics:

“We have enough interjections without the Treasurer inventing them.” I reckon the Treasurer had been practicing in front of the mirror.

5. I’ve never seen anything like this before. On Thursday Linda Burney moved a series of amendments to try and improve the Government’s redress scheme for child sexual abuse. They were all sensible amendments but the Government voted against all of them.

Adding insult to injury, they didn’t even bother to tell the chamber why they were opposing our changes. So I stood up and called on the relevant Minister - Stuart Robert - to explain the government’s position.

The Government voted against that too - meaning Government members actually voted to prevent a Government Minister from speaking. Even Stuart Robert voted against Stuart Robert speaking. https://www.lindaburney.com.au/media-releases/2021/2/4/government-votes-down-labors-redress-amendments-gags-minister-from-explaining-why?utm_campaign=210205_5and5&utm_medium=email&utm_source=australianlaborparty

PS. Song of the week: This is amazing. A member of the public named Rick Burchall sent this to me. It's a song he wrote and performed about the Morrison Government's obsession with shutting down debate. It's really clever. Listen and read the lyrics here: