Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Watson from moving the following motion immediately—The House calls on the Deputy Prime Minister to stand aside from Cabinet until doubts about his constitutional qualifications have been resolved.

Even the Prime Minister wasn't listening to a word of that answer. Even the Prime Minister was turning his back on the Deputy Prime Minister. When you're in a situation where you're off campaigning in your electorate—where you're already campaigning in the by-election—and the Prime Minister himself is turning his back on you when you're giving an answer, it's time to acknowledge that it's time to go, that it's time to stand aside. It's time for this Deputy Prime Minister to realise that it's no small matter when the Constitution says you probably shouldn't be here.

The argument from the government is what we heard yesterday and today from the Prime Minister of Australia—that the only reason they referred it to the High Court is to give the High Court an opportunity to make a decision on this section of the Constitution. Hang on. We'd already referred Senator Canavan to the High Court. They were already going to have an opportunity to rule on this issue. If they were already going to have that opportunity, why did we refer the Deputy Prime Minister to the High Court? There's one reason and one reason only.

There's a reason why they won't let anyone see the Solicitor-General's advice. It's not the ironclad, nowhere-to-go advice that the Prime Minister wants us to believe it is. He does know that everything for the legitimacy of this government hangs on that advice being as strong as he wants us to believe, so the only option the Prime Minister has is to tell everybody, 'It's unbelievably strong, but I'm going to keep it a secret.' When we asked, 'Why is it that we had to refer the deputy there in the first place?' he said it was to give them 'an opportunity', but they already had that as a result of Senator Canavan. They were going to rule on the same section of the Constitution.

We have a Prime Minister who will say anything and do anything to cling to office. We should deal with this motion immediately because the Prime Minister is willing to misrepresent advice from the Solicitor-General in order to make sure that he can get away with the crisis behind whether or not this government has a majority. If the Prime Minister thinks that me saying, 'These documents that you've got aren't as good as you say,' is an unreasonable argument for me to run, let's click back to Monday—because on Monday he said exactly that about documents in the possession of the Leader of the Opposition. On Monday he said exactly what I've just said, 'Those documents aren't as strong as you're claiming they are, and if you've got the courage of your convictions, you'll stand up and show the documents.' What happened straight after question time after the Prime Minister said that? The Leader of the Opposition said, 'If the conspiracy theories of the internet trolls are now going to be run by the Prime Minister of Australia, here are the documents.'

Unless the advice from the Solicitor-General is a complete con and unless the Prime Minister is completely misrepresenting the advice that he has, when he stands up in a moment he should provide us with the advice. Show the courage of conviction that the Leader of the Opposition showed. Show that you're willing to stand by the claims that you make. The Leader of the Opposition was able to sit here with the documents in his hand. The Prime Minister said, 'Show us the documents,' and we did.

It's not simply the Prime Minister's reputation that hangs on the strength of that advice; the entire legitimacy of this government hangs on the strength of that advice. This government, which claims to have a majority of one, has become the first government in the history of Australia to go to the High Court to ask whether it's true that it, in fact, has a lawful majority. It's the first time that that has ever happened in the history of our country.

What do they think is not a problem? They think it's not a problem to have doubt over every decision made on regional development, regional communications, local government, resources, territories, agriculture, water resources and northern Australia. As of Friday they will be willing to have under constitutional doubt, under a constitutional cloud, every decision that would otherwise be taken by the Prime Minister of Australia. We accept and we agree with every issue that has been made about national security. Why on earth in that environment is the Prime Minister about to put somebody, who we unanimously don't know if they're legally there, in charge of every decision that this nation takes while the Prime Minister is away?

How on earth can there be any level of responsibility from those opposite and from the Prime Minister if they're willing to take that sort of risk? But if he won't make that sort of decision as a matter of principle, if he won't make that sort of decision as a matter of precaution, if he won't even make that sort of decision as a matter of consistency, can I suggest to the Prime Minister: do it as a matter of self-defence.

If you date back to the moment the Deputy Prime Minister first stood there and told us about his New Zealand citizenship—since that moment, the government has become increasingly whacky. Since that moment, the government has lurched from one conspiracy theory to the next conspiracy theory. I don't know what was unleashed in the minds of those opposite from the moment we heard about the New Zealand citizenship of the Deputy Prime Minister, but from that moment we heard about the New Zealand conspiracy, the Cuban conspiracy, East Germany and the Berlin Wall; we heard from them about socialism, communism, Stalinism, and then the great United Kingdom secret-agent-and-Leader-of-the-Opposition conspiracy. Those opposite have gone into the most ridiculous spiral of self-satire since the moment the Deputy Prime Minister let it be known that he was a citizen of another country.

What's behind all of this is the document that the Prime Minister claims he's very familiar with. That is the document called the Australian Constitution. It's no small matter as to whether the Constitution is kept to. There are plenty of times when governments get advice from the Solicitor-General and, when they get the advice, they say, 'Yes, we're confident of what we're doing.' But when you get the strongest advice, that is not when you say, 'But we'd better go and check with the High Court.' That's not the moment you check with the High Court. You check with the High Court for one reason and one reason only—and that is that, after reading the advice, the Prime Minister thought, 'We don't know whether the deputy is legally here.' He looked at the advice and thought, 'We don't know whether we actually have 75 members of this parliament voting with the government. We don't know.'

There are lots of times when governments of both sides get advice that's strong and they stand at the dispatch box and say, 'No. Others might challenge this in court, but we are confident of our position.' This time they got the advice and said, 'We'd better go straight to the High Court.' That is why Labor will continue to pursue this issue: it goes to whether the government is lawfully in office. There have been real-life outcomes on penalty rates and real-life outcomes in terms of who's in charge of the banks. But here's the thing: it has also resulted in the real-life outcome as to whether he gets the job. Every other principle will go to one side when that is jeopardised. We've seen the Prime Minister being willing to compromise every previously stated view. He claimed to be passionate about something on the basis of: 'This is just what you have to do to maintain a majority.' We have a situation where, for the first time in the history of this parliament, there is doubt as to the constitutionality of the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Prime Minister, stand him aside. If you have any courage and if you have any authority, you would have done it more than a fortnight ago.

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