Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

He was a fake prince. It was a bit like that Coming to America movie, Senator Scullion, except I think Eddie Murphy was a prince in that movie. It was the other way around—he was faking that he was not a prince. The bureaucrat was faking that he was a Tahitian prince and he took off with $14 million worth of Queensland taxpayers' money. If we had the inquiry, maybe we could have gone to Tahiti. Maybe the inquiry could have gone to Tahiti and investigated the royal family in Tahiti, just to get to the bottom of it and make sure he was not, in fact, a prince. We have not had to do that. I think Queenslanders realise that we do not want another Labor government in Queensland after March next year. They realise the mess that the former Queensland Labor government has got Queensland in—more than $80 billion in debt at the moment. It was heading towards $100 billion before the government changed. We had a government that was rolling over the rights of farmers and landowners, particularly through native vegetation laws, and they have changed for the better. We now have a pathway back to not only a surplus but to try to get some of this debt down.

Those are all serious issues and there is another serious issue here. It is good that we have rejected the inquiry. It would have been an abuse of this chamber's power to set up an inquiry into another government. That is not what we should waste time on. We should focus on doing what we have responsibility for best. There are other avenues for people to have inquiries into other levels of government. There is a well-established principle of comity, which means that we should not have supported the inquiry, but we must always remember that the Labor Party were going to support the inquiry before it failed. They were going to run roughshod over those longstanding principles, much to the disgrace of their decisions here tonight. Some members of the Labor Party will be disappointed that they chose to try to get this inquiry up. Presumably the reason it has taken us about two months to get this point is that some people in the Labor Party were reluctant to support it. Maybe they should have won the day and it should not have come on, but it did. We are just fortunate that it has not ended up in an abuse of power. We have great privileges in this chamber and we should treat those seriously and never abuse the privileges for the sake of a witch-hunt type inquiry into another government in another state.