Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I might take the opportunity to apologise for being a few seconds late to question time—to you, Mr President, to the Senate as a whole and in particular to my opposition colleagues, since they are the ones who will be asking me questions today. Yes, Senator McEwen, I do remember the T&R Pastoral issue. It is a current issue. The investigation into that has finished. I think it was the week before we came back here, when it was very nearly finished. I had seen at least a part of the draft of the report and was unhappy with one assertion, and I wanted that assertion further checked. It was an assertion, incidentally, in favour of T&R, but I did not think that the few sentences there gave an adequate answer. In other words, you could have read this and still have been misbehaving. The statement, ‘It’s okay because of X, Y and Z’ that was made could have been true, but in the particular area that I was looking at—which was housing, the provision of housing and charging for housing—it could still have been true that they were not doing the right thing. It is possible to have two true statements; say only one and therefore mislead as to the other. So I asked for further work to be done on that.

Further work has been done on that; I have been verbally advised that the statement holds and the negatives that could have been there are not there. I will have to check and see whether the final report has come. It will be no surprise to indicate that there is an area where the people engaged on 457s are not doing the sort of work that they should be doing, and I am in the process of working out the best way to deal with that, both to ensure further that there are no problems in the future and also to maintain the production at T&R so Australian jobs are not lost. These are not competing interests; I think it is in everybody’s interest. But there are balancing interests to take into account, and I hope to have that matter resolved very soon.