Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

While the taxpayers are wondering what value they are receiving from Justice Heydon and his lavishly paid buddies, Mr Abbott and the Liberal Party are getting what they paid for. The Heydon royal commission wantonly ignores the standards that have been established and upheld by royal commissions before it—accepting hearsay, refusing objections and cross-examinations, double standards for different witnesses and even providing detailed briefings for the media. Dyson Heydon has overseen a royal commission totally failing principles of natural justice. They stand there and, as they have witnesses walking into the box, they start distributing to the press gallery, before the witnesses have even sat down or are handed it themselves, the documents that they are going to be cross-examined on. So the first time the witnesses get to see documents is as they are handed to the media. This is a star chamber that is about nothing more than helping this pathetic government get re-elected. This royal commission has been put in place, this star chamber, this quasi-judicial theatre, to smear and slander the Liberal Party's political opponents.

But Dyson Heydon's bias and partisan ways were finally exposed by the revelation that he had agreed to address a Liberal Party fundraiser—an absolute slam-dunk case. His claims that he was unaware that the event was a political fundraiser simply do not stand up to scrutiny. By his own admission, he received multiple pieces of correspondence that outlined the event's ties to the Liberal Party. The chair of a Liberal Party lawyer branch invited Mr Heydon to the event on 10 April 2014 and the email explicitly explained the relationship between the Liberal Party and the lawyer branch and the event itself. (Time expired)