Speaker of the House of Representatives, Milton Dick, says federal parliamentary staff are working overtime to have the building and its precinct cleared of dogs before the next scheduled sitting on Monday.
“Staff are working very hard to round the dogs up from inside the building as well as outside in the grounds and gardens,” Mr Dick said. (main picture)
He said hundreds of dogs suddenly invaded the House of Representatives chamber last Thursday night during Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech.
“The Opposition Leader was making his formal response to the federal budget and when he began his remarks about immigration policy the dogs just started appearing until there were hundreds of them roaming the chamber, corridors, offices, and outside areas of the building,” Mr Dick said.
“It was quite odd and something many long-serving parliamentary staff said they had never seen since John Howard was prime minister. ”
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A US political observer says Donald Trump has made a subtle change to his rhetoric as he tries to make crime and President Joe Biden’s allegedly inadequate response to it a central plank of his campaign to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for the 2024 election.
Professor of Public Policy and Criminology at Harvard University in Boston, Penny Tentiary, said a longstanding slogan for many US politicians, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, had been their pledge “to fight crime and the causes of crime”.
“Donald Trump has for some years used that same line over and over again,” Professor Tentiary said. “But lately I have detected a slight tweaking of his message when he has spoken at Make America Great Again (MAGA) rallies and other public events.
“He has taken to saying that if elected again to the White House he would once again ‘fight crime and the black people causing crime’.
“By modern-day Republican Party standards that is a very subtle change in messaging so it remains to be seen if it will work in his favour, although the number of people at his MAGA rallies who respond to it by waving miniature nooses suggests it may be cutting through,” she said.
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Veteran federal politician Bob Katter Junior, who turns 78 on 22 May, says he will seek re-election at the next federal poll despite the prospect of being 82 by the end of the next term of parliament if he wins his Queensland seat of Kennedy again.
Mr Katter rejected suggestions by some critics that he was too old and was showing signs of deterioration in his abilities to do the job of a federal MP.
“I mean, you know, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities,” he said when asked if he had considered retirement.
“Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom, as far as I am concerned. But I ain’t spending any time on it because (and here he switches abruptly to a frowny face and shouty voice) in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland.”
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