Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the remarks of my colleague Senator Brown when he said that what we desperately need in Australia is truth-in-advertising legislation. We also need electoral reform, very strong legislation on political donations to bring state electoral acts around the country into line, so that we do not have a situation where state governments can exploit loopholes in electoral acts, as the Labor Party in Tasmania has done in the lead-up to the election on Saturday.

There is a cancer in the culture of Tasmania. It is a cancer in the body politic. It set in 20 years ago under the then Liberal Premier, Robin Gray, when the William Carter royal commission released its report into the attempted bribery of Labor MP Jim Cox by Tasmanian media magnate and head of Gunns Kiln Dried, Edmund Rouse. The royal commission said that Premier Robin Gray had acted ‘deceitfully and dishonestly’ and had been ‘misleading and deceptively evasive’. The Premier of Tasmania was found by a royal commission to have exhibited that behaviour, and he was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse out on Saturday saying, ‘You can’t vote Green; you have to vote Liberal or Labor but not Green.’ This is a man who had been found by a royal commission to be deceitful, dishonest, misleading and deceptively evasive.

At the time, the royal commission investigated a group called Concerned Citizens for Tasmania. This anonymous group came out and said there had to be majority government and a second election. What the royal commission found was that it had been deliberately designed to mislead the community into believing that a group of well-meaning and concerned people had spontaneously come together to express their concern and to join others in voicing their protest about the Labor-Green accord, and it was found to have emanated from the Premier’s office. This is the man who came out in Saturday’s paper in Tasmania saying, ‘Trust me, don’t vote for the Greens.’ This is a man who the royal commission had fingered as having organised a campaign which was supposed to be spontaneous but which was set up to deceive the people of Tasmania.

That was a Liberal Premier, and the Liberal Party continued that in 2006 in the Tasmanian election. This was not just known in Tasmania. Senator Eric Abetz was a senior Liberal in Tasmania at the time. The Director of the Liberal Party, Damien Mantach, came out at the time and denied that the Liberal Party had anything to do with the Exclusive Brethren attack on the Greens. He said, ‘I want to firmly put on the record that the Liberal Party of Tasmania, during last year’s state election, at no time paid for or placed advertisements for any members of the Exclusive Brethren.’ Subsequently, as a result of a very brave act and a brave court case by Martine Delaney, it came out that the ads for the Exclusive Brethren had been billed to the Liberal Party and the Director of the Tasmanian Liberal Party had to say at the time, ‘I know it doesn’t look fantastic.’ No, it does not. It was deceitful. It was designed to mislead.

With this election now in Tasmania we have the Labor Party doing precisely the same. In 2006 there was a group called Tasmanians for a Better Future. Just like the Concerned Citizens for Tasmania before them, under the Electoral Act they did not have to say who they were or how much money they had or anything else. It was a secretive group and the organisation was the result of Corporate Communications run by Tony Harrison, who worked for Robin Gray in the eighties. So aren’t they a nice little bunch of people? Out they came with a slogan that said ‘Tasmanians for a better future’. Coincidentally, Paul Lennon, the Premier of the day, had the slogan ‘For a better Tasmania’. To this day, the Tasmanian people do not know who bought the 2006 election, who put their money into ‘Tasmanians for a better future’ or who those people are. The only person who has come forward and said he was part of it is Michael Kent, the former head of the TCCI, the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Now we have David Bartlett, the man who said that he wanted to lead the Labor Party in Tasmania and that he wanted to have a kind, clever and connected Tasmania. What the Labor Party is doing in Tasmania is not kind, not clever and not connected. Dirty dialling is not kind. The electoral advertisement designed to deceive—because there is no legislation in Tasmania to prevent it—is not clever and it is not connected. It will backfire on the Labor Party, I have no doubt. But the point is that the people of Tasmania are being bombarded by advertising which is putting out lies and misleading the community in that state.

We have had a succession of these premiers and these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was Michael Field, who broke his word and broke the Labor-Green accord—a signed document. He said he would not reintroduce security legislation and then he did so. He misled the parliament and he lied to the people of Tasmania. Paul Lennon was exactly the same—a Labor Premier of Tasmania, disgraced because of the relationship between his government and the forest industry. There was John Gay, Gunns, the Ralphs Bay canal development, and Tony Rundle, a former Liberal Premier. Need I go on! The extraordinary thing is that the four of them—Labor and Liberal premiers—have all broken their word to the people of Tasmania by saying, ‘Don’t vote for the Greens.’

The Greens are the only people in this context who have not broken their word and have stuck to what they said they would do. We have kept to the documents we signed. The people of Tasmania know that we will press for truth in advertising and it is up to Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott to now come out and support truthful advertising. That is what we want. The Prime Minister’s office and the Leader of the Opposition’s office both know and must act.