Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

is not only highly improper but is in direct breach of the international obligation for noninterference. Labor have now been well and truly caught out. Senator Penny Wong's chief of staff instigated a situation in which the Labour member of parliament in New Zealand was directed to ask questions about the Deputy Prime Minister, and the member for Grayndler let the cat out of the bag today when he said on morning radio that the Deputy Prime Minister's name was raised in the conversation. Of course, he's been monstered now, but he let the cat out of the bag.

That means that the Labor Party are misleading the Australian people, and New Zealand Labour, no less, have judged what they were asked to do by the Australian Labor Party as inappropriate, unacceptable and wrong and should not have happened. The Labor Party have also misled the Australian people by claiming that it was only questions from Fairfax Media to the New Zealand government that sparked this incident. Not so, according to the foreign minister of New Zealand, who has said that it was in fact the questions from the New Zealand Labour member, at the instigation of Labor, that sparked the entire incident. As the New Zealand media are reporting, the New Zealand government is under no obligation to answer questions from the Australian media. But as soon as those questions were put on notice in the New Zealand parliament, the New Zealand government had a legal obligation to answer.

So, the Australian Labor Party set up the New Zealand government. As Prime Minister Bill English said, these are serious issues, and there were significant misjudgements by the New Zealand Labour Party about urging them to interfere in the Australian political process. As the New Zealand foreign minister said, 'This is extraordinary, unprecedented behaviour to seek to invoke the New Zealand parliament,' and as New Zealand Labour have condemned Labor in Australia—unacceptable, inappropriate, wrong behaviour. It should never have happened. Labor stands condemned.

Opposition members interjecting—

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