Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble—maybe he's thinking of adventures in gay Paris! Maybe his speechwriter has suggested otherwise and he has his mind on other things, maybe ambassadorial roles. But he knows better than to go to that dispatch box in question time, where the truth is important. The truth is important. When you are a minister, you have to tell the truth. Whether it was an accident or otherwise, we do believe he has absolutely misled this House. It's important that he has an hour and 12 minutes to come back into this chamber. The House Practice absolutely demands he do so. We are requesting that he does so. Convention of the Westminster system absolutely makes it crystal clear that he should come back into this House and explain himself, come back into this House and admit that he was wrong. It's not hard to say you were wrong. It's up to him to say that he was wrong. He knows that he was wrong. He can't suggest that the coalition never put out a media release and his file suggested there were no media releases, because we know and have proven in these statements that the actual fact was otherwise. It is absolutely plain as day. The member for McPherson, the then home affairs minister said:

All Australians suffer when public money is defrauded. That's why this Government—

the coalition government—

is serious about taking strong action to protect against fraud.

It's rather damning to suggest that the coalition when in government did not do anything about fraud in the NDIS space. The minister, the former opposition leader who led Labor to the 2016 and 2019 elections—not quite sure how that went for him!—is very senior. He's been in this place as the member for Maribyrnong since 2007. It's incumbent upon him to come back into this chamber, explain himself, admit that he got it wrong and admit that perhaps that speechwriter to whom we're paying $600,000 worth of taxpayers' money got it wrong. Somebody got it wrong, but the buck stops with him because he was the one who said it. He was the one who erroneously claimed that the now opposition—the then government—did nothing to crack down on fraud in the NDIS. We did, and we've had minister after minister say that very thing. We've got the media releases.

I hear the member for Watson. We've proven it. We can table those media releases, obviously. The member for Maribyrnong says he hasn't got them in his files, but he would have. He only had to ask his department and they would've produced them. To suggest anything else is breaching convention. It is breaching the Westminster system. It is breaching House of Representatives Practice and it's breaching the good grace of this parliament, where truth is important.

Labor came to office in May 2022 and they said, 'We will restore integrity. We'll let the sunshine in. We'll be transparent.' This minister, today, has not been any of those things, and it's up to him to come back into this chamber now, and if the member for Watson, or whoever is following me in the speech, has even an absolutely slight consideration of how important House Practice is, how important the Westminster system is—and here he is, thankfully! Hopefully, he's going to make that truth be accountable.

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