Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. As the Manager of Opposition Business pointed out in the concluding part of his remarks, we don't think anyone expects the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction to come into the chamber voluntarily. This guy has form: whether it was 'watergate', 'grassgate' with Jam Land, or this latest scandal, he simply does not have the genetic capacity to face up to his mistakes.

This is now a test for the Prime Minister and a test for the Leader of the House. What do these ministerial standards mean if the emissions reduction minister is not forced to come into the House and either account for the statement he made on 24 October or face the consequences? That is why we have sought to suspend standing orders, because there is no more important question to the functioning of a parliament under the Westminster system than the question of ministerial accountability and the obligation not to mislead parliament.

The key statement, as the member for Watson has said, is the statement the minister made on 24 October, with full notice about what was in question:

The document was drawn directly from the City of Sydney's website.

He could not have been more definitive. He could not have been clearer when we last sat several weeks ago. But we now know that that the national and state libraries and the privately run public internet archives have confirmed that the City of Sydney's annual report has sat on the internet unaltered since November 2018—reinforcing what the city said when they released their metadata, when this parliament was last sitting, that there has not been any alternative version as is suggested by the minister.

So does the minister really suggest there was a version in March that was the same version in April, the same version in June and the same version in October, but somehow that was withdrawn in September and an alternative version was put up for a couple of days so that he could access it and then withdrawn? That is the only explanation that conforms to the minister's clear statement. Also since the parliament last sat, we have had testimony in Senate estimates from the department that confirms that the draft letter it provided to the minister and his office to send to the Lord Mayor of Sydney contained no figures whatsoever, and it doesn't know where he got the figures from. They've confirmed they have no idea where he got the figures from and that the minister did not ask for advice about the veracity of the figures included in the letter.

The question here is not whether the minister has misled the parliament, because that seems pretty clear. The question is whether the minister has been devious or bumbling or both. What I find utterly baffling is that no-one appears to have asked the question: how could 10 councillors spend $14 million on domestic travel in a year? Do some basic maths. If you're a Rhodes scholar you could do the maths. There are 10 councillors; it's pretty easy to divide figures by 10. This equals $28,000 per councillor every single week on domestic travel, which I work out as being 20 return trips to Melbourne and six or seven business class return trips to Perth every single week for every single councillor across the entire year. Every councillor would be spending 80 to 90 hours in the air every week for every week of the year. Why didn't someone say, 'I think we need to check these figures'? I've just divided the minister's figures by 10, and that is $1.4 million in domestic travel per councillor—$28,000 per week—with no time off at all.

There is a serious question about whether this minister is hopelessly bumbling or devious or both. But what every skerrick of evidence confirms about this case is that the document used by the minister to form this letter, which he sent to the lord mayor with the clear intention of influencing her public role around climate change, was not directly downloaded from the City of Sydney website. It is utterly clear that the statement he made on 24 October, a few weeks ago, is simply not right. And if the standards that the Prime Minister has outlined to his ministers mean anything, this minister must, over the course of the next several hours, come before this House, as the Westminster system requires him to do, and explain himself to the chamber.

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