Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I would not be saying ‘hear, hear’ too quickly, because unfortunately Queensland has produced the majority of cases of electoral fraud that have been investigated by this House; for example, the Shepherdson inquiry, in which we are talking about electoral fraud which cost the Deputy Premier of Queensland his job. It cost that rising star of the Queensland parliament—who now, I think, works for the federal secretariat of the Labor Party in Canberra—his job. It cost Mike Kaiser his job. It saw members of the Queensland Labor Party put in jail. I will not name them, because the poor woman, Karen Ehrmann, was the victim of bullying and thuggish behaviour by her factional warlords in Queensland—which we investigated in the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. I am not surprised that members of the Queensland Labor Party in this House have gone silent and hang their heads in shame. The sad thing was that members of the Australian Labor Party were jailed for electoral fraud in the 1990s and the 2000s, and unfortunately I had to go through the tawdry, messy, dirty and ugly business on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters of investigating those matters arising out of the Shepherdson inquiry.

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