Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I will deal with the home fax in a moment, Sloppy Joe. There was an email from Kay Hull on 20 March 2009 at 12.17:

We have a crisis in car dealer finance for many dealers, covering around 80-90 dealers in New South Wales.

It goes on very legitimately to talk about the nature of the problem. That came to my office at 12.17 on 20 March. At 12.28—11 minutes later—the reply goes from my office:

Kay, I will refer your request to the appropriate person in the department who will get in touch with the car dealer—

and so on. There was an immediate reply from Kay, who is also very diligent:

Thank you so much, Amanda—

and so on. The key line is in the next document, which is an email from the treasury department to my office on 23 March at 11.53:

FYI. In case Kay Hull asks you where this is at, I have spoken with the dealer and explained to him where things are at.

The next paragraph is the killer:

I told him to contact Capital Finance and to let me know if he gets resistance.

That was signed by Godwin Grech. That was not even a full working day before Godwin Grech got back to my office, and then there was a flow through to the representation that had been made.

There was some talk before about emails. I will deal with the home fax, because that seems to infatuate those opposite. I suppose they were so lazy when they were in government that they did not use a home fax. They did not have to; they had their weekends off.

I can inform the House that I am advised that two dealers, in fact, had more communications made on their behalf to assist them to secure new financing than did John Grant. In one case a dealer had approximately double the number of communications made on their behalf. I can tell the House that between 15 October last year and 19 June this year, Mr Grech sent around 130 emails to my office. There has been all this conspiracy—that some of the emails went to the Secretary of the Treasury, some of them went to senior members of my staff, and so on. Of these emails, around 80 were copied to the Secretary of the Treasury, some 30-odd contained documents specifically for my attention and around 20 related directly to car dealers. Out of all these 130-odd emails sent to my office, only a handful of the emails related to John Grant.

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