Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

If such documents exist and if such reports exist, I'm sure that we can find those things out when we actually investigate the efficacy of this question. I'm not going to simply accept that at face value—that because the opposition says something it makes it true. We see time and time again that that in fact is not the case. The Labor Party draw long bows, make exaggerations and use all sorts of means to try and twist the truth, and I've seen that for a quarter of a century in this place. So I'm hardly going to simply accept what the member for Rankin says and respond to it as though it's factual.

But I thought generally the question was an implication of conflict of interest—conflict of interest for our ambassador in Washington DC. As I said before, in my answer, the government have absolute confidence in our ambassador in Washington DC, and we're not going to take lectures from the Labor Party about integrity in politics. As I said in my previous answer, which I'm referring to, the Labor Party has a very long charge sheet when it comes to inappropriate behaviour in state and national parliaments.

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