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

is completely different. Take the member for Hindmarsh, who's of Greek heritage. He came to this place through the same election that I came in. At every election since he has repeated his renunciation of Greek heritage—every single time. He has done it again and again. Yet the member for Chisholm and the member for Mitchell, on the basis of what they've put out publicly, have never renounced their Greek citizenship. It may well turn out that the member for Hindmarsh has been doing this for no reason at all, but it's not going to be pretend legal opinion in this place that makes that decision. It has to be the High Court of Australia that makes that decision.

We are about to have a vote in this House on these issues. The vote in this House will either go through unanimously or be the first time that a vote of this nature has been done on partisan lines. This has been deliberately drafted to take into account the arguments that have been made by government members that we don't agree with. It has been deliberately drafted at the request of the member for Mayo to include the member for Mayo, even though we do not agree with the arguments the government has put against the member for Mayo. And it has also been drafted, quite deliberately, to say to the members who put on their register references to documents but then refused to actually disclose them: 'This was a process of disclosure. That's what it was.' We could have had a situation where we only had self-referrals but, in the week gone past, both the Leader of the House and the Prime Minister have made clear that there were going to be hostile referrals.

We could play the game of tit for tat on that. We could play it that way, but we won't. We are referring all the members over whom there has been a serious and continued doubt. We are making sure that the process of disclosure that we unanimously voted for is actually followed up, because if you go through a process of disclosure and you fail to disclose there should be a follow-up. If the follow-up is to rush around now with member after member trying to personally lobby the crossbench, saying, 'Oh, but here's an extra detail,' every detail they now want to refer to are details they hid from the register, and nine o'clock yesterday was the deadline for that register.

If this is defeated along partisan lines, does anyone really think that this issue is going to go away for the rest of this term? Does anyone really think the cloud that is hanging over the legitimacy of this parliament will go away because the government managed to get the numbers on the day? What we need to do as a parliament today is actually to have a resolution that I can tell you no-one in the parliament is completely happy with. I'm certainly not, because there are names there where I'm absolutely confident of their position and there are names here where those opposite are absolutely confident of their position. But the list of names we have here is the only way to be able to broker something so that the High Court gets to make the decisions that only the High Court of Australia can make.

We've been through a world of people in this House telling us they knew what the High Court would decide. I don't know what the High Court will decide on these, but I do know this is the only sensible outcome of a disclosure process. I would have liked this to have been negotiated between the opposition and the government—and we've sought to have those conversations—but, as I understand it, in a meeting with the crossbench today the Prime Minister made clear that he would support no further referrals of his own people even though they had failed to provide the information they'd referred to on their disclosure statements. If that's the situation, there are only two pathways in front of us: either we support this resolution or the cloud that is currently over the parliament will continue to be there.

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