Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Warringah moving immediately:

That this House immediately suspend proceedings for a period of not more than ten minutes to require the Prime Minister to make a statement explaining the nature of discussions she or her office has held regarding the loan provided by the NSW Labor Party to the Member for Dobell to cover his legal expenses and any discussions she or her office may have had with the Member for Dobell regarding the allegations against him.

It is with considerable reluctance that I move this suspension of standing orders motion, because—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I remind members of my comments of this morning. These are matters on which there will end up being a vote. If you want to remain around for the vote I think that you might sit there quietly.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I said, I move this motion with considerable reluctance, because outside this House the Australian people are interested in jobs and the threats to their jobs, particularly the threats that are now existing to the jobs of manufacturing workers in the Illawarra. But I regret to say that inside this House all members of the government appear to be interested in is the job of the member for Dobell and, more importantly, the job of the Prime Minister, which rests upon the continued job of the member for Dobell. This is why standing orders must be suspended.

As long as this government is preoccupied with defending the member for Dobell, it will not be addressing the issues of vital importance for our nation. As long as members of this government are stonewalling and obfuscating and as long as they are defending the indefensible and justifying the unjustifiable to protect their own position in government they will not be properly protecting the interests of the Australian people. This is why standing orders must be suspended. There are more than 1,000 jobs in the Illawarra right now that are under threat because this government has not adequately been able to defend the manufacturing industries of this country. The only jobs that this government is interested in are its own jobs and protecting the position of the member for Dobell. This is happening because this Prime Minister is not prepared to take the steps to preserve the integrity of the government that any of her recent predecessors would clearly have protected. Standing orders must be suspended so that the integrity of this parliament can be preserved and protected. It is extraordinary that the Prime Minister of this country thinks so little of the need to protect the integrity of this parliament and thinks so little of the need to uphold the proper standards of behaviour amongst members of parliament that she is not even prepared to sit in this parliament and listen to this debate.

I am prepared to have a wager that she will not respond to this motion. This is a Prime Minister who is so determined to stonewall, who is so determined to ignore issues of integrity in government that she will not listen to the debate and will not respond to the allegations that her member must face and the questions that she herself must answer.

For more than a week this Prime Minister has been asserting that the member for Dobell has her full confidence. On no fewer than eight separate occasions she has done so. Standing orders must be suspended for the Prime Minister to explain, because if this Prime Minister has full confidence in the member for Dobell, given the issues that the member for Dobell needs to address, it is very, very difficult for the Australian people to have full confidence in her. How can the people have full confidence in the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister continues to have full confidence in the member for Dobell? This is why standing orders must be suspended.

I am dismayed that this Prime Minister and this government, in particular, has resisted this motion for the suspension of standing orders, because isn't this the same Prime Minister that said that Labor was the party of truth telling? Isn't that what she said? What about a bit of truth telling from the member for Dobell and what about a bit of truth telling from this Prime Minister. Isn't this the Prime Minister who said at the beginning of this parliament that it would be a parliament of openness and accountability? Didn't she say repeatedly that there would be a new era of openness and accountability under the new paradigms? Didn't she say that we should let the sunshine in—that sunshine is the best disinfectant? So I say to all of the members of this parliament: the best way to let sunshine in is to suspend standing orders so that the Prime Minister can explain herself in this parliament.

This morning this parliament voted—not by absolute majority but by a majority— for the member for Dobell to make a statement. I regret to say that he did not make that statement. He was not legally bound to make a statement, but I would have thought that he was morally bound to make a statement by the vote of this parliament. Similarly, I would think that this Prime Minister in the absence of a statement by the member for Dobell is morally, if not legally, bound to make a statement to this parliament about what she knew and when she knew it. This ought to be the essential criteria for being Prime Minister of this country—that she is straight and honest with the parliament and through this parliament to the Australian people about what she has done. That is the minimum if the Prime Minister is to have any standard for integrity.

I am not asking the Prime Minister to explain the apparent misuse of credit cards. That is a subject that needs to be dealt with by the relevant member and that is, after all, something that is now being investigated by the New South Wales Police. But I do think that the Prime Minister should tell us what she thinks about the misuse of credit cards, because as things stand her stonewalling suggests that she does not think it is very important at all.

There are 70,000 members of the Health Services Union—70,000 low-paid workers whose fees, it seems, may well have been misused. The Prime Minister owes them an explanation of what she thinks about this kind of conduct. $90,000 has apparently been spent by the New South Wales Labor Party to pay the member for Dobell's legal fees. That is $90,000 in money that belongs to the Labor members of New South Wales. These are the members that buy Johno Johnson's raffle tickets; these are the members who believe in the light on the hill, which is not protecting the job of any particular member or any particular Prime Minister, but working for the betterment of mankind. That is what they believe and they are owed a decent explanation by their Prime Minister, particularly when they do not get one from the member for Dobell. That is why standing orders should be suspended—so that this Prime Minister and her government can put this grubby business behind it. Until this Prime Minister and this government can put this grubby business behind it, this government will not be able to address any other issues.

As things stand we have a Prime Minister in hiding on this issue, we have a member in protection and we have a government in paralysis. We have a government in crisis. I say to the Prime Minister: people with a reasonable explanation have nothing to fear from the facts. The facts is what this motion seeks to get—facts from the Prime Minister and ultimately facts from the member for Dobell. That is why this motion for the suspension of standing orders should be supported.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I say to the House that standing orders should be suspended in order to allow the Prime Minister the opportunity to come back into the chamber and make a full explanation to the House about her involvement and that of her officers in the gift of at least $90,000 to the member for Dobell from the New South Wales ALP to settle his defamation action with Fairfax Media Ltd and about any discussions she has had with the member for Dobell about his remaining in the House or as Chair of the House Standing Committee on Economics.

Since last Tuesday we have asked eight questions in this place of the Prime Minister or other ministers about what they knew and when and about their confidence in the member for Dobell. All we have had in response from the Prime Minister is stonewalling and obfuscation. Any other prime minister worth their salt–whether it is the current member for Griffith or the former Prime Minister John Howard or Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating or Bob Hawke—would have understood the necessity to take action today, or in fact weeks ago, to restore integrity to this government. If the Prime Minister was worth her salt, she would come into the House, she would make an explanation about everything she knows and she would clear the air. She would do so to restore integrity in this government in the eyes of the public.

But we know what she has said about how much she loves power. She told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005: 'I'd cheerfully kill several hundred people to get the opportunity to be a minister in the short term.' We know that she was prepared to assassinate—politically assassinate—the member for Griffith when he was the Prime Minister. Goodness knows what she will do to cling to power.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Sturt must relate his remarks to the suspension.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The reason it is relevant, Mr Speaker, is that the Prime Minister has spent the last week obfuscating and stonewalling in this House, because we know she will do anything to avoid having to go to the people from losing the member for Dobell. If she had the integrity that she claims, she would come into the House and put this issue behind her, clear the air and restore integrity into a government that is struggling.

The controversy surrounding the member for Dobell is paralysing the government. The government is utterly distracted by it. For weeks allegations, claims and supposed misrepresentations have dribbled out through the press and have now become an avalanche of stories every day for the last week. The issue has paralysed the government, a government that was already struggling and already showing it was incapable of occupying the government benches. Whether it was the live cattle export issue or the protection of our borders, the Malaysian solution, the announcement of the carbon tax or the breaking of the promise on the carbon tax that she made before the election, restoring confidence in the economy or protecting Australian families from rising cost-of-living pressures, these are the issues the Australian public cares about and these are the issues the government cannot and will not address while it is paralysed and distracted by the controversy surrounding the member for Dobell.

We move this motion to suspend standing orders to give the Prime Minister the opportunity to give a 10-minute speech, because we in the opposition want to give the Prime Minister the opportunity to clear the air, to put this matter behind her government—to move on so that ministers and backbenchers, the opposition and the government can all focus on what matters to the Australian people, which is their jobs and their livelihoods in a collapsing international economy. With the crisis of confidence among the community in this government and in the economy and with daily stories about job losses—whether it is at BlueScope or OneSteel or Westpac or Qantas—these are the issues we want to get on to, but until we get answers from the Prime Minister and the member for Dobell about the controversy surrounding him the government is paralysed and distracted, and that is why the Prime Minister must come into the House and give a full explanation of her involvement. (Time expired)

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there were any doubt that the Leader of the Opposition was unfit for high office, we have seen it demonstrated yet again today in this debate for the suspension of standing and sessional orders. The Manager of Opposition Business outlined a range of real issues of import to the Australian community—the issue of the pressure created by the high Australian dollar, the issue of the global economic situation and the issue of jobs. These are the issues that this government is focusing on but the opposition could not care less about. After one question from the Leader of the Opposition, they end question time by moving a suspension of standing and sessional orders. We have seen it all played out in the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition: one standard for himself and another standard for everyone else. Hypocrisy writ large. There is only one member of the Australian parliament who has charges against them—and it is not just shoplifting—and that is a member of the opposition. When did that occur? In May. When did we find out about it? In July. For two months they said absolutely nothing to the Australian people or in their party room. She is still chairing a committee; she has just stepped aside so she stays on the payroll. What hypocrites we see of those opposite. There is no process, there is no convention, there is no tradition, there is no norm that this Leader of the Opposition will not trash. This man is not a conservative; he is a reactionary who has been determined from day one, in what is the longest dummy spit in Australian political history, to trash the parliament, to trash its institutions and to drag everything down. You never see those opposite happier than when an Australian loses their job. They are only concerned about themselves, and we see it day in, day out.

Just look at their hypocrisy. The Leader of the Opposition spoke about parliamentary standards, but last year, on 17 September, he said:

… what we envisaged with the Parliamentary reform … was that the House of Reps would have a pairing system very much like the system that’s operated effectively for years in the Senate, where typically the government hasn’t had a majority …

He went on to say, later that same day:

I also support doing what’s reasonably necessary to ensure that the Parliament can function given the closeness of the vote in the parliament.

What a farce. Today, we saw the Prime Minister's vote not counted because she was doing the job of a Prime Minister—a job that this man will never do because he is incapable of holding high office. We saw the Minister for the Arts and the member for Wentworth prevented from attending the funeral of Margaret Olley. Last week, we stood as one in this House for the condolence motion on her death; yet today, in spite of the fact that it would have no impact on the result—no chance did the opposition have of getting an absolute majority—they chose to make a petty, mean-spirited act, lacking in old-fashioned decency. Then they came in and moved a motion to override the separation that exists between judicial proceedings and the parliamentary process. We had the shadow finance minister's speech last night—an outrageous attack under parliamentary privilege. We had a motion this morning and now we have another one.

This is what the Leader of the Opposition said about the member for Bonner, when there were investigations taking place:

"The matter is really now before the police and perhaps the Criminal and Misconduct Commission in Queensland, and let's let those authorities make their investigations and come to any conclusion," …

"He's a backbench Member of Parliament and I think he's entitled to stay in the Parliament until these bodies have come to their conclusions," he said.

We also have Senator Brandis, of Brandis on Brandis fame. This is what he had to say today, as reported in the Australian online:

… while the Thomson matter "has potential important political ramifications, from my point of view this is not primarily a political matter, it is primarily a legal matter".

That is what the shadow Attorney-General said just today. Of course, he has also said about his own side:

I think people ... are entitled to the presumption of innocence … Particularly since these people are members of parliament …

What a farcical situation we have. Former Prime Minister John Howard had the same thing to say on 7 March 2007. He said, 'A lot of people who are under investigation end up having nothing to answer for.'

The Leader of the Opposition's hypocrisy is perhaps best exemplified by his actions in the establishment of Australians for Honest Politics. Remember the slush fund? When David Oldfield set up One Nation out of his electorate office, along with Pauline Hanson in Warringah, he said, 'A hundred thousand dollars in the fund—we still don't know where it comes from.' When the Leader of the Opposition—the same person who is now moving a motion that the Prime Minister should respond, and there are no allegations against the Prime Minister—was asked, 'Where did the money come from?' he said in the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 September 2003:

"There are some things the public has no particular right to know."

That is what he said.

But, of course, he was part of a government where there was barely a day in its 12 years that one of their frontbench was not under investigation or under threat of having to resign. They lost nine ministers and parliamentary secretaries. It was a revolving door over there because of the accusations and the proven circumstances which led to the resignation of minister after minister, parliamentary secretary after parliamentary secretary, day after day.

We know that they then stonewalled. They had a position whereby, no matter what you did, you were going to get defence. We had Wilson Tuckey providing references to police on his letterhead and Peter Reith giving his credit card to his son, conceding that he should not have done so, and his son giving it to someone else, with the public picking up the bill for all of that. We had the misrepresentation to the public about 'children overboard'. We had scandals involving the former Minister for Foreign Affairs over AWB. We had the member for Wentworth with his rainmaker grants. We had the member for North Sydney launching tourism campaigns for farm stays a couple of days after he opened his own farm stay business—a bit of insider knowledge there. So, day after day, we had those sorts of circumstances occurring, but what we heard from the now Leader of the Opposition was:

"There are some things the public has no particular right to know."

Earlier this year, on the front page of the Australian, one of his mates who helps run the group that has raised over $110,000 for Tony Abbott was talking about Work Choices, but he made no declaration of interest whatsoever.

The Leader of the Opposition gave an interesting speech last week to the AMA. He said: 'You don't have to judge me by my words; you can judge me by my actions.' Well, we do judge the Leader of the Opposition by his actions. His actions are those of someone who is absolutely desperate because they cannot engage in a policy debate about the future of this country because they are too busy trying to dig themselves out of a $70 billion black hole. That is why those opposite have gone away from the policy debate on the economy; they have no interest whatsoever. They are just interested in slurs and digging dirt on members of parliament. It is important that due process be upheld.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the debate has expired. The question is that the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition for the suspension of standing and sessional orders be agreed to. Question put.

(The Speaker—Mr Harry Jenkins)

The House divided. [14:34]

Question negatived.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.