Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Bob Carr) to a question without notice asked by Senator Fierravanti-Wells today relating to corruption and foreign bribery.

In doing that, I note that Senator Carr was asked yesterday and today to deny that the state government he led was corrupt and that it took all of six questions for Senator Carr to get around to actually saying that the government he led in New South Wales was not corrupt. That in itself raises some questions, as do Senator Carr's very short, curt and, if I might say, embarrassed answers to questions raised of him today. He took the coward's way out in the first two questions simply by saying that they were not relevant to him.