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

Madam Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to move a motion. It is:

That the House requires the Member for Dobell to make a statement to the House immediately, for a period not exceeding 10 minutes, about the matters arising from Fair Work Australia’s inquiry into the Health Services Union that relate to him.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Sturt moving immediately—That the House requires the Member for Dobell to make a statement to the House immediately, for a period not exceeding 10 minutes, about the matters arising from Fair Work Australia’s inquiry into the Health Services Union that relate to him.

In question time today, the Prime Minister again turned her back on the members of the Health Services Union and instead stood up for the member for Dobell. We know that she could have announced today that she would ask the New South Wales Labor Party to pay back to HSU members $267,000 of their money that was used in the campaign for Dobell in 2007. But we know that she will not, because, at this particularly precarious time for her leadership, while people like the minister for workplace relations and the member for Griffith are breathing down her neck, she will not take on Sussex Street.

Standing orders should be suspended today because the most urgent matter facing the parliament is its integrity and its reputation, and right now sitting in this chamber is a member—the member for Dobell—who has continued to fail to explain to the parliament his side of the story in one of the most tawdry matters that this parliament has ever had to witness or to deal with. Eight months ago, on 9 September 2011, the member for Dobell said, 'I will make a comprehensive statement in the near future.' He said that he would make a comprehensive statement in the near future, and now—eight months later—we are still waiting to hear it. We have moved on six occasions suspensions of standing orders to allow the member for Dobell to make a statement in this House so that we as members of parliament can be informed of his side of the story, and on six occasions the Labor Party and the crossbenchers have combined to defeat those suspensions of standing orders. Standing orders must be suspended so that we can debate this motion and pass this motion and so that the member for Dobell can keep his promise that he would make such a statement.

The Prime Minister has ducked and weaved on this issue faster than the full forward of the Western Bulldogs. We know now that the member for Dobell in fact excused himself from the caucus and that it was the member for Dobell who offered to suspend his membership of New South Wales Labor Party, and yet the Prime Minister in her statement to the press that she referred to in question time today insisted that in fact she had taken action. We know now that the Prime Minister was being her usual tricky self—tricky Julia.

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