Thursday, 19 February 2026

 Joe McCRACKEN (Western Victoria) (18:21): (2337) My adjournment is for the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. I am glad to see you are in the chamber tonight. It was about a media release that you sent out this week, which talked about the Liberal Party cutting a deal with One Nation. I am not sure if, Minister, you wrote that yourself, but it did have your name on the header of it. This rhetoric has sort of been trumpeted by a number of your members as well. I just want to pause for a reality check here. In this very chamber the Labor Party negotiates with the crossbench every single week, which includes One Nation, particularly when votes are tight. That is not a scandal. That is how finely balanced parliaments work. But apparently when Labor negotiates, it is responsible government, but when anyone else does it, it is some sort of moral crisis. The minister further went on in the release and said:

Jess Wilson and the Liberals must come clean …

Is she going to continue aligning herself with Pauline Hanson, who will say anything to divide Victorians?

Coming clean – really. Amidst one of the worst corruption crises this state has seen, we are getting a lecture on coming clean – really. Secondly, just to note, Pauline Hanson is a federal senator, not a member of this Parliament. But if we want to talk about and conflate federal and state politics, I am more than happy to go there. There is one person I would really like to talk about: Mark Latham.

Mark Latham was a federal Labor MP from 1994 until 2005. He was endorsed by the Labor Party no less than five times. He was not peripheral. He was Labor’s leader from December 2003 to January 2005. He led them to a federal election. Today he sits in the New South Wales upper house, originally elected as a One Nation MP. He climbed the ladder of opportunity and look where he has landed. So if proximity to One Nation is suddenly grounds for political condemnation, maybe those opposite should look at their own party’s history, because Mark Latham is a part of Labor’s legacy just as much as Gough Whitlam or Julia Gillard or Paul Keating are. The truth is simple: the government negotiate with the crossbench when it suits them, they moralise when it suits them and they rewrite history when it suits them. The action I seek from the minister is this: will you publicly denounce Mark Latham as a former leader of the Labor Party, a five-time endorsed candidate, Leader of the Opposition and former One Nation MP because of his comments on multiculturalism, or will you just accept him as another part of your proud Labor history?