Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—It may be that the new Minister for Ageing does wish that this report will underwrite and rule a line under the controversy that has dogged this government for the last couple of weeks, but it is extraordinarily difficult to believe that this almost excuse of a review that the government has tabled today will draw a line under anything. In fact, I think this report does no credit to the new minister. It asks more questions than it answers. It makes it perfectly clear that there was no intention on the minister’s part to in any way actually conduct a thorough, detailed, independent review of his former minister’s activities.

For example, there is going to be a separate review that deals with a whole range of probity issues. We do not know why the government has not rolled these two reviews together. We do not know whether there are any questions that came to the minister’s attention with respect to these allegations. We do not know why he has taken no external advice on this issue. On the questions that have been raised, which make it quite clear that former Minister Santoro and his staff met with affected people, we have no assurances of whether or not that is the sort of procedure that was available to all other people who were tendering for these same allocations.

The report is absolutely full of all sorts of legal protections that the new minister might want to provide to us: ‘On the evidence available to me,’ ‘In the time available to me,’ ‘Without any expert advice’—there are a whole range of protections to give this minister wriggle room in the future if anything more comes out with these dealings that is untoward. Minister, if you expected this report to rule a line underneath the controversy that has dogged your government for the last few weeks, you will need to do a lot more than this. This report does not adequately answer any of the questions that have been raised.

My Senate colleague Senator McLucas, who is the opposition spokesperson on ageing, has made it perfectly clear that this report has not answered a whole range of questions that have been raised about other applications that have been made. As she states, quite rightly, the review is predictably a whitewash. We have an investigation—the most interesting point that the minister does not address at all. The new Minister for Ageing, who is investigating his former colleague’s activities, who did not even interview his former colleague and did not interview Mr Egan jnr, the other person involved in these allegations and these claims, is prepared to come into the House, is prepared to hold a doorstop and say,  ‘This is the end of the matter for us. I am entirely confident that there has been no wrongdoing.’ He has not even interviewed the two main players in the whole scandal. That is not going to wash, Minister. You know that, while it might be a bit of a thankless task to get a new job like this when you first come into the ministry, doing this in a week and just saying that it is adequately going to rule a line underneath it all is just beyond belief. You are not going to be able to sell that to the public. You are certainly not going to be able to sell that to the Labor Party. There are many more questions that are going to be asked.

In tabling this report you have probably caused yourself more grief than you have satisfied any questions. For example—and I have said this already—you do make sure that this report protects you in a number of ways. You are at pains to say, ‘On the evidence available to me’, but you are not very careful in asserting that all of the evidence has been presented to you. You have not spoken to the two key players. You have not answered the questions about why there were meetings with this particular person but not with others who might have been seeking the same allocation of places. We do not understand how it is that the conclusion is reached that there was no exertion of influence when the report itself actually talks about interactions between the staff and the person making an application, Mr Egan Jr, and the minister himself. We do not believe that this is going to be an adequate way of dealing with this issue, Minister. It is just a cover-up. Trying to do it so quickly with no evidence and without answering all these other questions that are available is just not good enough.

Minister, when even in your own report you are prepared to say, ‘This is all I’ve been able to do based on the evidence I’ve got and without any external advice,’ it does not exactly fill us with confidence that this has been taken seriously. Why, Minister, didn’t you take the time to do this properly? Why didn’t you set up a proper, independent, rigorous process that was going to interview your former colleague, was going to make sure that someone at arm’s length from government was taking this seriously? That would have been a more credible process. Instead, we still have no answers. You can go and do a doorstop and say that this rules a line under it from the government’s perspective, but that is not going to rule a line under it from our perspective. It is not a credible and independent review.

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