So back in September when Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton was trying desperately to distract attention away from his whimsical habit of personally intervening to give visas to au pairs from people he and/or his party knew, he entered parliament holding two binders filled thickly with documents and prominently labelled with “Tony Burke” and “Chris Bowen”.
The implication was that he had a literal heap of red-hot files on the two former immigration ministers showing that they too had a bunch of dubious visa approvals. So what explosive data had the ex-Queensland cop gathered?
Home Affairs Didn't Give Peter Dutton Any Files For "Tony Burke" And "Chris Bowen" Folders https://t.co/lPBNg8A4b1 via @joshgnosis
— BuzzFeedOz Politics (@BuzzFeedOzPol) November 2, 2018
Well, Buzzfeed has reported that a Freedom of Information request has revealed that whatever the folders were filled with, what it definitely was not was files on Tony Burke or Chris Bowen.
Right To Know published the details of the request, including that “the Department did not provide any documents to the Minister for Home Affairs for the specific purposes of inclusion in two folders”.
That the folders didn’t contain files was already pretty much known, after home affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo told the Senate that “We would never brief a serving minister on decisions taken, papers rendered or notes provided to a previous minister under any circumstances”.
So what did the folders contain? Dutton’s collected poetry? Fun drawings of Pete as a cool secret agent fighting baddies? Potato recipes? We may never know.
“IT’S NOTHING BUT AU PAIRS!”
But it’s only the latest – and, arguably, most childish – stunt in the rich history of politicians bringing fun props into parliament instead of doing their actual job like adults over the last little while. For example:
Bill Heffernan Brings In A Fake Pipe Bomb, May 2014
The Liberal senator followed up his celebration of 2009’s Bring A Knife To Work To Show How Lax The Security Is Day by bringing a fake bomb into parliament in 2014, proving that the authorities were pathetically unprepared for members of parliament to bring their own handmade explosives into the chamber.
He also helpfully gave his family’s secret recipe for explosives: “get some nitropril, a quart of distillate, a plug of jelly and a detonator, light the bloody thing and [it would] go to buggery.” So there’s a fun project for any disgruntled backbenchers with time on their hands.
Scott Morrison And His Friend Mr Coalsy, February 2017
In what now seems like foreshadowing on his priorities as PM, ScoxMox brought a lump of coal into the chamber in order to sing its praises and accuse the opposition of being scared of it.
It also inspired Greens MP Adam Bandt to bring in a solar panel, which was rather more cumbersome. At least it wasn’t an entire wind turbine.
Pauline Hanson Is Burquawoman, August 2017
OK, technically it was a niqab; but the One Nation leader wanted to prove that anyone could just sneak into the Senate dressed in Islamic garb, even… um, actual senators who are completely authorised to be there?
Like so many of Hanson’s stunts, statements and policies, this raised more questions than it answered.
Sadly, her stunt took all the attention away from Labor’s Rob Mitchell who had chosen the same day to attempt to give then-Foreign Minister Julie Bishop a tinfoil hat, which… actually, Rob, that’s pretty pathetic. Bullet dodged, mate.