But Who Is Tony Burke?

Well, I'm not really sure. But I do know one thing. He had this to say in his maiden speech:

When we acknowledge the incredible strength and richness of the many cultures which make our nation so vibrant, from Indigenous Australians through to the most recent immigrant, it has an impact on how Australians relate to each other at the workplace, in the shopping centre and in the playground. When members of this chamber talk, very few people tune in and certainly none of the under-fives in that Greenacre playground listen to the broadcasts, but somehow the message gets out. When members here demean others, divide communities and vilify some of the most vulnerable people, those people do not have to be listening to feel the hurt.

I'm not sure what this means in terms of, like, you know, "illegals" and all them. But he's picked up on a key problem with The Old, whose disdain for his constituents did occasionally filter out to divide the broad community and vilify vulnerable people, like mentally ill detainee Peter Qasim:

"I don't bemoan, I don't assail the release of Peter Qasim," he said.

"However, I think there's quite a bit of debate about how co-operative he's been with the department in basically establishing identity and ethnicity.

"I say the question of defining people such as him as stateless is a worrying precedent.

"Statelessness is basically about those people who don't have documentation and can't be returned because of their situation.

"If it's a question of someone not co-operating, not signing documents, not really being definite about who they are and where they come from is a different matter."

Good to know that he's not bemoaning. I'd get a bit sick of unmedicated mentally ill people being un-cooperative with a department that I had no input into, too, if I was the shadow minister for immigration. I mean, like, God, if the government can't do it's job, it's because they're having a rough trot with all those illegals, and it's hardly his place to condemn something that he knows nothing about. Yeah. Yeah.