MINISTER TUDGE CAUGHT MISREPRESENTING HIS OWN POLICY

Last night on ABC’s Q&A program the Minister for Citizenship was unable to defend his own Government’s policies and resorted to misrepresenting them.

Under pressure from Labor’s Clare O’Neil, Minister Tudge referred to his own legislation as requiring ‘conversational’ level English.

 

CLARE O’NEIL: We need people to be able to function here of course but requiring people to speak university level English is ridiculous.

            MINISTER TUDGE: We’re not saying that. It’s conversational English, Clare.

 

This is a complete misrepresentation of the Government policy. Either Minister Tudge doesn’t know his own policy or he felt free to completely misrepresent it on live television.

 

Legislation the Government introduced to the Parliament last year demanded the same test and the same entrance mark that is required for university level English.

 

The legislation was later withdrawn by Peter Dutton after being rejected in the Senate.

 

Since that point the Government has continued to insist that the costly IELTS test be used. This test is not about conversational level English. For example it requires the applicant be able to write an essay. This is hardly how you test conversational level English.

 

This is another example of members of the Liberal Party saying one thing in front of a multicultural audience while doing something completely different when they are in Canberra.

 

When a policy is so bad that the only way a Minister can defend it is to completely misrepresent it then it’s time for the Government’s citizenship changes to be abandoned altogether.