George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Who in this chamber speaks most loudly about the role of the Senate and the importance of parliamentary scrutiny of legislation? I suspect it is Senator Bob Brown. I suspect nobody makes as many sententious speeches as Senator Bob Brown about the role of the Senate as the check and balance and as a house of review, the importance of whose role is never to be underestimated. Yet who this morning, in the most disgraceful act I have seen in the 11½ years I have been in this place, gleefully went along with a Labor Party procedural motion to effectively eliminate a committee stage from the consideration of the most complex package of legislation the Senate has considered in a decade. Mr Deputy President, guess who it was? It was Senator Bob Brown.

Who speaks more loudly about integrity than anybody in the Senate? Once again, it is Senator Bob Brown. Yet as Senator Macdonald's question today—and indeed yesterday—to Senator Conroy demonstrated, it is Senator Brown who has an issue. Senator Macdonald's question has revealed that the man to whom the Greens political party is in debt for a $1.6 million donation—personally negotiated by Senator Bob Brown and the largest negotiation in Australian political history—is the same man, Mr Graeme Wood, an entrepreneur from Tasmania, who is now proposing to set up a new media venture: a so-called not-for-profit journalism enterprise to be called the Global Mail which will be initiated in February next year.

It has been estimated by a commentator who published on the Crikey website that the start-up cost of Mr Graeme Wood's enterprise is likely to be between $2 million and $3 million. Let those who listen to this broadcast join the dots for themselves. The man to whom Senator Brown's political party is in debt for a donation of $1.6 million, personally negotiated by Senator Bob Brown, is the entrepreneur of this enterprise for which Senator Brown now seeks tax deductible status in a submission to the media inquiry. That is what was disclosed by Senator Ian Macdonald's questions to Senator Conroy today and yesterday.

Remarkably, it is not even a policy of the Greens political party that tax deductible status for not-for-profit journalism enterprises ought to be afforded.