17 Quotes by Tony Burke

I don't understand when there's excess capacity at mainland detention centers, why there's a need to take these asylum seekers as far away as possible from the best legal teams.

Jobs should be advertised in Australia before anybody even thinks of handing opportunities overseas.

We don't know how many of those people are Australian citizens, we don't know how much longer than three weeks they were detained.

We're talking about extraordinary amounts of money simply for a public relations exercise.

They can't come after us. There's no way.

If the reports today have any validity, then you've got to say somebody who had the job for Saddam Hussein of chasing dissidents falls on the dangerous side of the equation.

Malcolm Turnbull got a majority in the parliament that he is trying to ignore and lock his own members of parliament into positions that they don't hold, and sometimes into positions that we know he doesn't hold. It's no wonder the public's started turning on him.

The claim that the Government made that there were 21 measures in it is wrong. We said we wanted to wait till we saw the bill because we didn't to trust that it would be as they described and it's turned out we were exactly right for saying that. The Government has been entirely deceptive with this. And if their first action is to lie to the Australian people about what was meant to be their centrepiece bill, that really tells you want the [Malcolm] Turnbull Government's going to be about.

With a close parliament, if the Government wants to get a good outcome for the nation, they can't play a game of lying to the public about what's in their own legislation. They can't do that.