John Watson (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In politics it is said that if you excite the interest of your opponents then you must be actually achieving something. From the events of the last few days, it appears that the Member for Bass, Mr Michael Ferguson, must be doing very well as a local representative. Why? Because the Australian Labor Party has slowly wheeled out all its big guns to mount a baseless political attack on him. First, we had Senator O’Brien, in the late adjournment last week, dredging up completely false allegations that Mr Ferguson had somehow breached the provisions of the Companies Act and spreading sufficient innuendo to make it look as though Mr Ferguson had some case to answer. Then we had the same senator, Senator O’Brien, making totally baseless allegations about Mr Ferguson’s personal website. Now we see that Senator O’Brien has put on notice questions designed to attack the church—churches are under a lot of attacks lately—to which Mr Ferguson and many of his, my and Senator O’Brien’s constituents belong: a big church in Launceston.

Then in the other place the member for Denison, Mr Kerr—a colleague of mine—was prodded by his colleagues into asking a question of the Speaker to make a totally specious claim about Mr Ferguson. I repeat: if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. This is obviously the motto of the ALP dirty tricks campaign department. They slander and defame someone under the cloak of parliamentary privilege and hope that something will stick—however baseless the allegations.

Let me deal with these dirty tricks in order. The first assertion was that Mr Ferguson had somehow breached the Corporations Act 2001 because ASIC had not been notified of his resignation as a director of a public company. Senator O’Brien was very careful in what he said in this place, as he spread the mud, because if he had read the act itself he would know Mr Ferguson had done nothing wrong whatsoever. Yes, section 205A of the act provides that a director may—and I emphasise ‘may’—advise ASIC of their resignation as a director. However, that same section goes on to say that any action by a director does not affect the company’s obligations to advise ASIC under section 205B. As anyone who knows even a small amount about corporations knows, it is the obligation of the company secretary, not the directors themselves, to advise ASIC about appointments and resignations of directors. Indeed, section 5 of the act, which amongst other provisions sets out the duties of company secretaries, says that the first duty of a secretary is that he or she:

... notifies ASIC about changes to the identities, names and addresses of the company’s directors ...

Therefore, it was not Mr Ferguson’s responsibility to notify ASIC of his resignation—it was the secretary’s obligation. So we can dismiss that baseless allegation.

Now we address the next baseless allegation made by Senator O’Brien under privilege. Senator O’Brien’s allegation is that Mr Ferguson’s personal website said that he was awarded the ‘order of the British empire award for community service’ in 2000 and that this claim is somehow untrue. As someone familiar with the Order of the British Empire Association, which has chapters in every state, I know that Mr Ferguson was indeed the recipient of an award before he entered parliament. There is no such honour as the ‘order of the British empire’ in any case. How could Labor claim that the member for Bass had been untruthful? They are making, whether deliberately or not, the common error of confusing the order of the British empire with the separate honour of Officer of the Order of the British Empire, which entitles a person to the letters ‘OBE’ after his or her name. That is a monumental mistake. Michael Ferguson has never claimed that he received this honour. All he claimed was the truth: that he was proud that a non-political organisation of eminent people in Tasmania had seen fit to give him an award for community service—an award quite consistent with Mr Ferguson’s hard work in the Northern Tasmanian community both before and after his election to the House of Representatives.