Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Acting Deputy President, I did not anticipate that this report would be delivered at this time; I thought it might have been delivered a little later. As many senators would be aware, I was intimately involved in the exposure of what might be one of the dirtiest political tactics that the coalition perpetrated in the last federal election. My colleagues and I were alerted by internal Liberal Party sources that the Liberal Party was going to distribute fake leaflets in the seat of Lindsay in the 2007 election and we were given the opportunity to catch the perpetrators of this action.

It was indeed very gratifying for us in the Labor Party to get a hold of the perpetrators because, as many Liberals in New South Wales would know, they used similar racist material in the 2004 election against our candidate in the seat of Greenway. The candidate in Greenway for the Liberal Party, a well-known member of the Hillsong Church, Louise Markus, was the beneficiary of a sustained and constant, anonymous, racist attack by people associated with the Liberal Party in 2004. As I recall, in 2004, the swing against the Labor Party in Greenway was somewhere in the vicinity of 11 per cent, but I think the informal vote was even higher because our candidate was of the Muslim faith.