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

I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Committee of Privileges and Members' Interests:

(1) whether the conduct of the Member for Pearce, by refusing to disclose on the Register of Members' Interests the identities of individual donors to a Trust used to pay his private legal fees, has failed to properly register an interest where a conflict of interest with his public duties could foreseeably arise or be seen to arise, and in doing so created a precedent which threatens the integrity of the Register of Members' Interests;

(2) whether the Member for Pearce has knowingly provided false or misleading information to the Registrar of Members' Interests;

(3) whether this constitutes a contempt of the House; and

(4) whether paragraph 2(k) of the House Resolution on the Registration of Members' Interests requires Members to provide reasonable identifying details of the sources of gifts that meet the relevant thresholds.

Mr Speaker, I will start by thanking you for considering the matters that I raised and for making the decision to grant precedence in weighing those issues up. Had you not done so, I'd be in a position of having to move a suspension of standing orders instead of us being able to put it to this House.

I note that, for the entire time of your speakership, there have not been many occasions where privileges references have been made, but, in every instance, when you have decided to not give precedence, the House has accepted that and no suspension has been moved, and, when you have given precedence, the House has then resolved to send the matter to the Privileges Committee. I urge the House to do exactly that today. In doing so, the House is not making a decision. I do not want members opposite to feel that they are being asked to adjudicate on the member for Pearce himself, but they are in a situation where the Speaker—elected unopposed—has said that there is a prima facie case here, and the resolution allows the committee of privileges to examine the merits of this.

What they would be examining is no small matter. We have here not the sort of blind trust that members have used previously. There have been a number of times when members come to this parliament having already, in their lives, amassed considerable wealth—good on them; there's no problem with that—and they want to make sure they avoid conflicts of interest, so they therefore put their money into a trust, and someone else handles where the investments go. Up until now, that has been what we have dealt with in the register when we have dealt with a blind trust. The member may not have known where the money was being invested but we knew exactly whose money it was.

On this occasion, we are dealing with something that, if it is allowed to stand and if you are allowed to do this, we may as well not have a Register of Members' Interests at all. The term 'blind trust' is being used—this is a brown paper bag stitched together by lawyers. We have no idea whose money is involved. If we accept what the member for Pearce has said publicly, we know the first thing—he can find out where the money has come from because he was able to say it's not foreign donors and it's no-one on the lobbyists' register. So he has made clear that he can find out whose money is in this trust, from which he has personally benefited for a personal bill. He can find out who it is and he has chosen not to. In choosing not to, he wants us to allow a situation to stand where the Register of Members' Interests does not allow the public to know who gives us money. Think about that. Think about the purpose of having a register. The whole reason it's there is so the public know if a member of parliament gets money. The public have a right to know where that money has come from. What the member for Pearce has done—there is a prima facie case of this, and the privileges committee will get the chance to examine it if this is carried—is something that no-one else in this House has tried on. Since Federation, no member of parliament has tried this—to receive income and not let anyone know who is paying.

The concept that he has no idea, I've got to say, I have difficulty with. There are philanthropists out there who could fund any charity in the world. To think that they look around for the different funds in a time of a pandemic—there's plenty of need out there—and say: 'Of all the different causes, the one I want to give money to is the legal bills of the member for Pearce. But I don't want him to know that I ever gave a cent, and somehow I've found out that this secret trust exists.' We're meant to believe that, if we're to believe that the member for Pearce has no idea at all.

But just start with this simple principle—why do we have a register? If you don't believe in having a Register of Members' Interests, vote against this. I get that. If you don't believe members of parliament should be held to any standards, vote against this. But if you believe that the public have a right to know where money comes from, if it comes to us, then allow the privileges committee to examine it. I don't know what they will find. There have been a number of times when precedence has been granted and I thought, 'Yes, we've got there,' and it has come back without an answer that I thought was great. But that's their job, and as a parliament we've appointed people to the privileges committee to do that job. Sometimes, regardless of party affiliation, those members on that privileges committee have taken their jobs seriously, have taken their integrity of that role seriously and have voted contrary to what might otherwise be considered party lines. The classic example of that would be Bruce Billson. I made the reference that precedence was given, it went through unopposed, we ended up with a unanimous decision coming back from the privileges committee and then the resolution was carried unanimously through the House. That's how matters of integrity should be dealt with. And that's what this House is being asked to consider again.

If we're not going to refer the member for Pearce, think about what's then allowed. Any member of this House can then set up a blind trust, have whatever income they want go into it and receive the money, and all they have to say is: 'I got it from the trust. I don't know where the money came from.' If we start with the principle that disclosure is there to avoid corruption, that the register is there to avoid corruption and that we want to avoid conflicts of interest to avoid corruption then we need to oppose a system where members of parliament can keep secret who is giving them money for personal bills.

If you're wondering whether this is just an issue for Labor, remember the extent to which those opposite railed against a Labor senator who disclosed where he had had money come from because it had been to pay for a personal bill and because of where that money had come from. He's no longer a member of parliament and he left because of that. If you think that was a reasonable prosecution of the facts, right now, the member for Pearce is wanting to create a situation where those facts would never be known, where anyone can just set up a trust, where it doesn't matter what business interest, what potential criminal interest, what potential overseas interest gives you money, where all you have to report is, 'I got the money from the trust.' No-one has ever tried this before, not because no-one had cause to possibly think of it—probably some people had—but because everyone just knew it would have been outrageous.

We've all known that you're not meant to do something like this—to say: 'Oh, someone gave me a wad of cash. I don't know who they were. But, yes, I got it. Good on me'—and yet the person who previously had been the Attorney-General of Australia in this House and had charge of introducing the anticorruption body, and then never did, is the person who has set this up. So, when this comes to a vote, I simply ask everybody to think of the way members have voted previously when they have taken their role on the Privileges Committee itself, because on that committee they have always acted with integrity and responsibly and they have said that they owe a duty to the parliament. Well, we all do, and this vote is a test of that, because if this is allowed to stand the Register of Members' Interests is obliterated in terms of being a disclosure document; the concept that we find out what the conflicts of interests are for members of parliament is obliterated; the concept that we have mechanisms in place to avoid conflicts of interest and corruption is gone. That's the decision that's in front of this House now.

The Privileges Committee might come back with an answer that I don't expect. That's on them. But it would be the cover-up to end all cover-ups if this House prevents the Privileges Committee from even being able to look at this resolution before us. If all they were allowed to look at was the letter that's been sent to them by the shadow Attorney-General, without the authority of it being a resolution of the House, it would mean they would deal with it differently. The only time the Privileges Committee has an obligation to report back is when the information gets to them by a resolution of this House. Everybody here at different points has made speeches about integrity. Everyone in this House has made speeches about standards. This resolution is a test of whether or not we hold to the exact words that, on different occasions, every one of us has uttered.

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