Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I understand the sensitivity and the seriousness of these matters, and I am trying to walk a line that does not prejudge Senator Santoro’s statement to the Senate. That is why I have not as yet sought to refer the matter to the Privileges Committee, but it may well be necessary. To be frank, Senator Santoro would have to have a pretty damn good story—certainly much better than the one he has advanced so far—for senators across the chamber not to consider that this matter ought to be referred to the Privileges Committee.

It is clear from Senator Santoro’s own evidence that the declarations he consistently filed in the Senate were not accurate—not once, not twice but on numerous occasions. The reminder sent to him—and to all other senators—from the Committee of Senators’ Interests to update his returns were ignored and share trading and shareholdings were not declared. We now know that at least 72 transactions were not declared to the Senate. So any defence based on inadvertence will look very thin, because you can forget one, you can forget two, but to forget 72 different trades is clearly not something that any reasonable person could accept as being an inadvertent omission.

The reason I moved this motion today is that I think this is an important matter for the Senate. These events challenge confidence in the register and people’s confidence in the ability of the Senate to properly maintain the Register of Senators’ Interests. As people know, there is a general disquiet in the community about whether or not the Prime Minister is able to properly maintain the Prime Minister’s code of conduct and ministers’ adherence to that. Clearly, that has not been the case on this occasion. Given the history of share trading impacts on previous ministers of the government, it beggars belief that such trading could have occurred with such contempt for the rules of the Senate and the Prime Minister’s code of conduct.

I am particularly concerned about the Prime Minister’s actions when he was confronted by Senator Santoro with the admission that he had bought shares in a company where a conflict of interest with his ministerial duties had arisen and that those shares had not been declared. The Prime Minister did not seek to have him correct those failings immediately and make a public declaration about them. What occurred was that the minister was allowed at his leisure, over a period of two months, to make a declaration that he had purchased the shares—not that he had the shares prior to that event but that he had purchased shares. The minister made a declaration which did not reveal the fact that he had held those shares prior to a recent purchase. So the Prime Minister was less than open, less than transparent, in the way that he allowed Senator Santoro to behave. That does go to the question of the standards applied by this government. It does go to public confidence in the system where the Prime Minister allowed an issue like this to be dealt with on the quiet, on the hush-hush, without any proper public accountability and allowed the senator to provide a statement that was far from transparent—one which did not identify the fact that the senator had held those shares for a long period of time and had failed to declare them.

On a cursory examination of the declaration made in December, one can note that the shares that he listed as having sold were shares that he previously had not admitted to buying. It does not take a genius to understand that, in making his declaration under the Prime Minister’s supervision, he was declaring that he had previously misled the Senate. That is how amateurish the whole thing is. The declaration lists shares as being sold that were never listed as having been bought, in addition to the key conflict of interest of the CBio share purchase. So there is a real undermining of confidence both in the Prime Minister’s code of conduct and in the Senate’s register of interests that this Senate ought to seek to address. We will address the issues of Senator Santoro following his explanation. I am a bit surprised that he did not bring himself into the chamber immediately.