Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The documents that were appended to the Attorney-General's statement, the correspondence between the WA government and the Treasurer, was the correspondence I was referring to. You have asked me about some other correspondence that was sent to the government. I will certainly inquire about that correspondence and report back to the House as to whether it can be tabled. It may be that it has important issues of confidentiality as between the WA government and the Commonwealth government.

I just want to put this in context. The Bell Group litigation, as I think honourable members know, has been going on for over 20 years. It is a modern version of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce litigation immortalised in Dickens's novel Bleak House, where the lawyers are basically chewing up the assets of the estate. And what the Western Australian government sought to do was to deal with that. The legislation that they passed had a fatal flaw in it—it may have had others—which was that it was inconsistent with provisions of the federal taxation act, a point which was raised by a number of parties in the litigation, including the Australian Taxation Office, and which was the basis for it been struck down. I am prepared to accept that the Western Australian government's desire to bring the litigation to a close and ensure that the assets were fairly distributed was a reasonable one, but it was, from their point of view, flawed from a constitutional point of view. The Australian Taxation Office was represented, the Commonwealth was represented, the section 109 argument was put, I understand, by number of other parties, and if you read the High Court's judgement, their decision on that was very emphatic. That is the fact of the matter.

Mr Brendan O'Connor interjecting—

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