Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition moving immediately that this House censures the Prime Minister for his failure to:

(1)

hold the Minister for Defence to acceptable standards of accountability and responsibility;

(2)

take action to protect the welfare of SAS soldiers and their families;

(3)

dismiss the Minister for Defence:

(a)

over his incompetent handling of the SAS pay scandal which has caused significant financial and emotional harm to SAS soldiers and their families; and

(b)

for his contradictory statements to the House and the attempted cover-up of the Minister’s personal knowledge of the harm the SAS pay scandal has inflicted on the families of SAS soldiers.

It is remarkable that, on a day when the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research has said that there is not one job in Australia that is safe, the Prime Minister has decided to secure one job—the job of his incompetent, careless, slovenly, misleading Minister for Defence, who stood here just a few moments ago and misled the House, not for the first time, when he said that he was only aware of one phone call from the family of an SAS soldier. Yet we have an email, which he has too, which he received from the partner of an SAS soldier and to which he replied himself. He replied himself and yet he is not aware of it! The list of the things this Minister of Defence does not know is very long indeed. He did not know there was a problem with SAS soldiers having their pay docked. He did not think there was a problem with putting soldiers on the front line and their families on the breadline. He did not realise, he said, that there were many emails and complaints coming to his office until he learnt about it some time between question time yesterday and this morning. Now, of course, we know that one of those emails was one to which he personally replied himself, signed Joel Fitzgibbon. This is an email he was not aware of, apparently!

Yesterday the minister said, ‘There is a bond of trust between our armed forces and the government,’ and that is true. It is a bond of trust between our armed forces, the men and women we send into harm’s way, the men and women to whom we say, ‘Take our uniform, take our flag; put your lives on the line; we are with you.’ And that bond of trust has been shattered by this minister. There is nothing more important to our national security than the morale of our armed forces. They know that they must go where they are told. They know that in their service they run the risk of death and worse. They know they take on that risk but they believe—or used to believe—that there is always a government standing behind them, that there are always people who care, people who will look out for them and their families, people who will ensure that they are cared for and will stand behind them as loyally as we ask them to stand up for us. And what do we have here? This is not a minister who has just made a mistake, who has made an error of judgment. For months and months he has known, as has his Prime Minister, that our finest fighting men were having their pay docked. They were getting little or nothing in their pay packets. We were told on 22 October that this error was going to be fixed, and nothing happened.

When the minister was brought into this House to explain how this could be so, how he could have been so careless, so indifferent, so heartless, so unfeeling about our own soldiers, he said, ‘Oh, it was a problem with the computer.’ He sounded like a clerk in the billing department of a department store explaining to his boss a problem with his inventory. This is not an inventory—these are soldiers; these are fighting men. They are the best that Australia can put in the field, but the best of us have received the worst and most callous bureaucratic indifference from this minister.

There is nothing more important to our armed forces than morale. If morale is undermined, the effectiveness of our armed forces is undermined. The Prime Minister has been as culpable as his minister, because he sat next to that minister on 22 October. He would have realised then, if he had not before, that soldiers were not being paid. The Prime Minister heard that, and he heard his minister say the problem would be fixed. A Prime Minister who was committed to the armed forces, who saw our soldiers as more than a series of photographic opportunities, would have brought that defence minister into his office, sat him down, and said: ‘Come on, Joel, fix it. It’s got to be fixed right now.’ Everyone on this side of the House knows that is exactly what John Howard would have done. It would have been fixed within the hour. There would have been an announcement, apologies would have been given, financial positions would have been reinstated and the soldiers would have known that behind them there was a government, led by a man who was committed to them.

What we have had is a Prime Minister who took this minister at his word, took no interest in whether the problem was being solved, and now one slipshod explanation after another has been revealed. This is a minister for whom the excuse ‘the dog ate my homework’ would be an improvement on the pathetic excuses he has given us today. He has blamed everybody but himself. It has been embarrassing to sit in the House and listen to this pathetic string of excuses. What do we have now? We have a minister in whom our fighting men and women can have no confidence, because they know that it was only after intense political pressure and public pressure, which this minister said should never have occurred, that something would be done. This is the remarkable thing: the minister deplored and decried the fact that members of parliament, including the member for Curtin, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition—who represents many of these soldiers, whose barracks are in her electorate—have taken up their cause, and yet we know that had she not done that, had the member for Paterson not done that, had the shadow minister for defence, Senator Johnston, not done that, had the opposition not stood up for these men, nothing would have happened—a big fat nothing, just like these men got in their pay packets in January. That is all they would have got, and one pathetic excuse after another.

There is a principle of ministerial responsibility. This minister can blame the defence department, he can blame its computers and he can blame the dog that ate his homework as much as he likes but, as a matter of law and principle, he is responsible. He is the Minister for Defence; he is responsible for everything that is done in the defence department. This is not a problem that occurred without his knowledge; he has known all about it for months. Each and every Australian knows and, more importantly, each and every member of the Australian armed forces knows that this problem could have been fixed in a few hours. All it needed was leadership, commitment and will, and the minister had none of those. He was not prepared to lead, he has no commitment to the armed forces and he was not prepared to do the work, to make the effort to get the thing right and to ensure that the soldiers were paid.

He said yesterday that he was disappointed that this had ‘descended into a debate about who is more supportive of our troops’. It is a debate about who is more supportive of our troops, because I cannot imagine anybody who could be less supportive of our troops than the Minister for Defence. The only honourable thing for the minister to do is to resign. If he will not do that then the Prime Minister is letting down our soldiers, he is betraying the defence of Australia and he is contributing to undermining the morale of our armed forces by leaving this incompetent in the job that he holds today.

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