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

Madam Deputy Speaker, I intend to raise a matter of privilege. I understand that under the current arrangements I present the matter of privilege to you and you will then convey it to the Speaker and then he will deliberate on it and you will convey his decision back to the House.

In the form of a letter to the Speaker, I write to you under the provision of the House of Representatives standing order 51 to raise a matter of privilege in relation to the member for Dobell, who, I believe, has deliberately misled the House on 21 May 2012 and request that the Speaker grant precedence to allow a motion to refer the matter to the Committee of Privileges and Members' Interests for inquiry and report back to the House. The standing orders provide that where a breach of privilege has been committed, the Speaker may grant precedence to a privilege matter and allow a referral to the Committee of Privileges and Members' Interests in circumstances where a prima facie case exists and where the matter has been raised at the earliest opportunity.

My complaint concerns the statement to the House by the member for Dobell on 21 May 2012, which for the following reasons was intended to mislead the House. (1) The member's version of events given to the parliament is an outright contradiction of the findings of the report of 28 March 2012 of Fair Work Australia's investigation of the national office of the Health Services Union under section 331 of the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act 2009, based upon its analysis of the same assertions which the member made to it and which it found not to be credible. (2) The member's key claim is that he was set up by enemies within the Health Services Union. The only piece of evidence to which he points is the alleged threat by another union official, Mr Marco Bolano, that he would 'ruin his political career by setting him up with hookers'. He did not specify when this threat was made or the context. On the basis of this single threat the House was asked to conclude: (a) that this threat was given effect to by an unspecified number of unnamed people; (b) that in order to give effect to the threat these people (i) hacked into the member's mobile phone on numerous occasions in such a manner as to conceal the fact that the phone had been hacked and to mask that in the billing of the phone calls to various Sydney brothels; (ii) took the member's driver's licence and subsequently returned it without his knowledge; (iii) impersonated the member at the Sydney brothels, where it is established that—

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