Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

He may well have had the assistance of his $620,000 speechwriter in preparing those remarks, which he has just made in this House!

The fact is that the member for Maribyrnong has form in being highly misleading. The workers of Chiquita Mushrooms, for example, thought that he was acting, in an unqualified way, in their best interests when he was the secretary of the Australian Workers Union. But, in fact, we know that there was a deal done under which Chiquita Mushrooms workers, represented by the AWU, ended up with terms that were not as good as many other workers'. There were unusual payments to the union. The union received a $4,000 payment per month over six months in return for what the union, then led by the current member for Maribyrnong, claimed was for health and safety training.

The fact is that it may be the case that the member for Maribyrnong is used to operating in environments where he could get away with making statements that are entirely factually wrong and, by consequence, make claims against individuals and indeed people who have had significant positions of responsibility in this nation which are entirely factually incorrect. He may be used to working in environments where he's able to do that. But this is not such an environment.

If you make a statement in this place which is clearly demonstrably and factually wrong, and if you make that statement and preface it with clear evidence that you have prepared making that statement and that you've gone through your files, you can hardly then say, 'It was an accident; I somehow managed to miss the five media releases—' which I was able to find with the assistance of my hardworking staff and other hardworking coalition staff in about 15 minutes. Five media releases—there may very well be more. We haven't found just one that proved that what he said was factually incorrect. We haven't found just two. We haven't found three. We found five in literally a few minutes. I doubt there has been, certainly in this term of parliament and perhaps for a very long time, such an exercise in making a statement which is clearly untrue and which is clearly calculated to provide political advantage.

What the minister was seeking to do was position himself as some kind of holder of virtue on this matter as the person who has solely twigged to the fact that there may be a risk of fraud. He should have twigged to this a very long ago, because he was the genius who created this in the first place. Every one of those coalition ministers worked very hard to try and clean up the mess he created. In the two years that he has been in government, he has done very little about it. The best he can do is make statements which are entirely factually incorrect about the record of coalition ministers. So this minister needs to return and apologise.

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