Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

So in preparation for estimates last week I also addressed the issue that is at the very heart of this issue, Senator Singh, with the secretary of the department of immigration. He provided some very pertinent information on this, which I will also come to. My comments today here in defence of the Attorney-General and the government have absolutely nothing to do with gender, as has already been alleged by those on the other side—that our position has been misogynistic and gender-based. I absolutely refute that.

My questions then and today went to the heart of two things: why this inquiry was called and when it was called. To me they are the two most salient questions in relation to the government questioning on this issue and why the Attorney-General lost confidence in the President of the Human Rights Commission. When I looked into this—before the hearing last week, during the hearing and afterwards—I found it was a complete Gordian knot. It was almost impossible to determine what the answers to those two questions were. As I said—and I will go through them in a minute—there were seven separate distinct and contradictory answers as to why it was called and there were four distinct and contradictory answers as to when it was called. Then thrown in, as a bit of an additional bonus, for the first time in the evidence last week we had that Operation Sovereign Borders was actually a factor in it being called. Again I will come back to the detail on that shortly. That was me going into the inquiry and the hearing last week trying to make sense of two very basic questions.

As has been asserted on the other side, getting frustrated at not getting a consistent answer from someone giving evidence is very different from playing the person and from personal attacks. I witnessed no personal attacks from those on my side inquiring, but they were getting frustrated with the ever-changing answers and testimony of the Human Rights Commission.

Let us have a look at a couple of these questions. The first one I had a look at is: when did the HRC decide to launch an inquiry into the welfare of children in migration detention? You would think, given the importance of this issue, it would be a simple response. But I had four answers: the first answer was in February-March 2013; then, in response to a second question, they decided on an inquiry in June-July 2013; then the answer changed to November-December 2012; and the fourth answer, which I had to split into two, was in her letter of clarification on 10 December. The first answer was, 'We decided to conduct a review on 26 June 2013', which presumably was just a review or an examination under their act, and then almost in the next paragraph of the same letter she said that they had decided to conduct an inquiry in December 2013. By the end of the hearing, last week, I had four different answers to a very simple question.

If that was not confusing enough to those of us listening to this evidence, we then endeavoured to work out the reasons behind the decision to conduct the inquiry into the welfare of children in immigration detention. Again, something that should have been quite simple was clearly not answered correctly or clearly in November, which caused the government to lose confidence in the president. The first answer was, 'The increasing number of children being held in detention in 2012 and 2013 and the policies of the new government not having an effect on the numbers prompted the inquiry.' I had to read that about three times. Here she was saying that the policies of the government were not impacting—

Senator O'Sullivan interjecting—