Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not particularly want to speak to the report. I will just respond to some of the allegations Senator Fierravanti-Wells made in relation to the release of the supporting material to the Fair Work Australia report. I want to directly respond to some of those things because it is so typical with the Liberals that, when they do not get their way, they see a conspiracy and try to make political grandstanding out of what were very carefully considered decisions that were made, particularly by the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations References Committee.

So let's be very clear: when the committee got the Fair Work Australia report into the HSU, it released it virtually immediately—as soon as it was practicable to be released. When the report was able to be uploaded onto the committee website, it was. There are many volumes of documents of supporting material for that report, but it is the Fair Work Australia report itself which is a distillation of all that material. That material contains many documents that name different people—people who are not the subject of any allegations and who are not public figures—and it would be an incredible breach of privacy if this committee simply uploaded what I think amount to tens of thousands of pages of receipts, letters, minutes and a whole range of other supporting material that have been distilled and summarised in the actual Fair Work Australia report, which is made public.

We know that all that supporting material has been handed over to the relevant authorities: the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions and also the New South Wales police and the Victorian police. While there are currently no proceedings afoot, I am certainly concerned that the potential exists for continued detailed public canvassing of the matters contained in the documentation to become a factor in whether proceedings are in fact instituted in the future and for any such proceedings to be prejudiced by the release of those documents in the form that Senator Fierravanti-Wells is suggesting. Such an eventuality is of great concern, and I have no desire to contribute to a situation where the allegations that have been made and the evidence which underlies them is not tested before a proper forum. If charges are going to be laid, all those things should be tested in the appropriate place, and that is a court of law. I would not want to be party to doing anything which may in fact undermine that proper course of action. That is the proper course of action, and that is the approach the committee took.

So I reject outright the allegations that Senator Fierravanti-Wells has made in respect of those documents. They are simply not true.

Question agreed to.