Tony Burke had a busy week with a cyber hack, arts backpedal and immigration detention debate

Australia Broadcast Center

03-07-2025

Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Brett Worthington gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
The minister walked into a studio.
Add in his three portfolios and on the surface it's classic joke structure.
A man walks into a familiar environment and hilarity ensues.
Tony Burke, the minister for home affairs and immigration, cyber security and the arts, was the man walking into the ABC studio this week.
But once he started talking, it was clear that there wouldn't be a laugh anywhere in sight.
Burke is one of the most senior figures in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government.
When the parliament is sitting, he runs the House of Representatives and is among the names thrown around as could-be prime ministers one day (though, in fairness, there are no shortage of names that get thrown in that category).
His hefty workload is a sign of the trust Albanese puts in him but it also means, as was the case this week, he's a man trying to put out many fires on many fronts.
Burke's week started with a Sunday morning interview on Sky News, in which he conceded nobody in the so-called NZYQ cohort had come close to meeting the threshold to be re-detained.
The cohort consists of hundreds of people released from immigration detention after a landmark High Court ruling found their detention was unconstitutional.
The ruling prompted a raft of legislative responses rushed through the federal parliament at breakneck speed, including ankle monitoring, curfews and mandatory jail sentences for visa breaches.
There was also the establishment of a preventative detention regime, which allows authorities to apply to a court to have someone re-detained if they were deemed a threat to the community.
"No-one has come close to reaching the threshold that is in that legislation," Burke told Sky News.
The minister's comments prompted Coalition cries that the laws need to be re-written, not that the Coalition was rushing to offer up any suggestions on what that might look like.
Burke, instead, has other plans.
"I keep meeting with the department and keep asking, 'OK what people do we have at different thresholds that we can run a case …' I'm not giving up, I'm going to keep doing it, but I'll tell you, to be honest, I would much prefer the individuals out of the country," he said.
Given the whopping majority the government commands in the parliament, Coalition demands can be easily dismissed.
Labor backbenchers furious that the party breached its platform kept stayed quiet when the government rushed mandatory sentencing laws through parliament last term.
At the time, the spectre of a Peter Dutton-led Coalition government spooked those who might otherwise speak out against their party.
But with Dutton now vanquished and another election years away, quietening concerns on the backbench will become a much harder feat.
By Wednesday, Burke was walking into the ABC's studios in Melbourne, where another scandal was engulfing another portfolio.
Hours earlier, Qantas admitted it had fallen victim to a massive cyber hack on a third-party platform that held the records of 6 million customers.
The airline confirmed names, email addresses and phone numbers had been accessed, but credit card and passport details were not.
Burke, wearing his cyber security hat, said he'd spoken with the acting chief executive twice earlier in the day and that the airline was fully co-operating with the government.
"I know that Qantas have been doing a lot over time to uplift their cyber security," he said.
"But, you know, any vulnerability is unacceptable."
The interview was only just getting started and Burke was suddenly having to account for another scandal that had engulfed another of his portfolios.
As he reached for his arts minister hat (you can decide what that might look like), he told the ABC that 20 minutes before he'd entered the studio he had taken a call from Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette.
Collette was was ringing to tell Burke that Khaled Sabsabi had been reinstated as Australia's representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
It's been a rollercoaster few months for Sabsabi, who was commissioned for the prestigious art event in February, only for him and curator Michael Dagostino to have their invitation rescinded a week later when the Creative Australia board intervened.
Their initial announcement prompted criticism in the federal parliament, with Liberals condemning works from decades earlier that depicted former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and a 2006 work depicting the September 11 attacks.
In the months since, there's been a review of the initial decision that found "no single or predominant failure of process, governance or decision making that resulted, ultimately, in the decision to rescind the selection of the artistic team", but instead "a series of missteps, assumptions and missed opportunities".
Burke told the ABC that all decisions had been at arms-length from his office but that he had continue to support the board throughout.
"When they made the decision to appoint, I said I supported it," Burke said.
"When they made the decision to terminate, I said I'd support that."
(The whole description sounded a lot like Pauline Hanson in 2018 when she insisted she hadn't flip flopped: "I said no originally, then I said yes. Then I have said no, and I've stuck to it." But we digress)
The saga has seen prominent departures from Creative Australia. Burke insists the organisation retains his confidence.
There's no doubt Burke, a guitarist, is a lover of the arts, particularly live music.
But with everything else already on his dance card, the sector is closely waiting to decide if the portfolio needs to go to someone who can dedicate more time to the role given the dire outlook for parts of the $64 billion sector.
Politicians are often accused of being out of touch and detached from the issues of real people.
Anyone watching Sunrise on Wednesday morning got to see just how human they can be.
Speaking about a horrific story that emerged from Victoria a day earlier, Housing Minister Clare O'Neil wiped away tears as she spoke of the panic she was struck by when she frantically checked if her children attended a centre linked to an alleged child sex offender.
The incident prompted the state government to urge infectious diseases testing for about 1,200 children.
Inquiries were launched, there were calls for a royal commission and the federal government quickly vowed it would cut the purse strings to centres that put child safety at risk.
It's been a decade since a royal commissioner recommended working with children checks should be streamlined and standardised across the country, and federal education minister Jason Clare this week conceded implementing that change had taken too long.
He conceded the system wasn't up to scratch and that change "can't happen soon enough".
Like O'Neil, there are no shortage of parents of young children that sit around Albanese's cabinet table.
The public has seen the outrage they felt following the revelations from Melbourne.
They're also now watching to see what the government does to stop it happening again.