Liberal MP Peter Phelps has admitted plagiarising parts of a newspaper column by conservative English journalist Peter Hitchens for a speech on the Syrian refugee crisis in the NSW upper house.
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In the Mail on Sunday last weekend Hitchens – the brother of the celebrated late journalist Christopher Hitchens – penned a column titled: "We won't save refugees by destroying our own country".
Raising the images of the dead Turkish child Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach which have horrified the world, Hitchens said he was "not unmoved".
But he wrote: "The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.
"I'll go further," he continued. "The use of words such as 'desperate' is quite wrong in this case. The child's parents were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic.
"Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child's body was washed up."
On Tuesday night, Dr Phelps rose in the NSW Legislative Council to deliver his speech on the Syrian refugee crisis, containing lines almost identical to those by Hitchens published two days earlier.
"Aylan is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws," Hansard records Dr Phelps as saying.
"The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims for a hefty fee.
"But I will go further. The use of words such as 'desperate' is quite wrong in this case. Aylan's family were safe in Turkey. They had been living there for three years. His father worked on a construction site.
"And Turkey, for its many faults, is a member of NATO, officially classified as free and democratic. Many Europeans actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where his body was washed up."
On Wednesday Dr Phelps posted a link to the speech on Twitter with the comment: "My views on the Syrian problem (best not to read it if you are the hysterical type that values emotion over fact)."
Asked if he had plagiarised parts of Hitchens' column, Dr Phelps told Fairfax Media: "Yeah, that's what I did."
He said he was not embarrassed because "if someone has a good turn of phrase I'm absolutely going to borrow it".
Dr Phelps said had it been an academic or newspaper article he would have attributed the lines and that he had also borrowed from journalist James Delingpole and Jenan Moussa, a reporter with Arabic Al Aan TV.
