Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Or he could be both. As Senator Dastyari quite correctly points out, he could be both misleading and grossly incompetent.

But the matter gets worse for Senator Abetz because we now know that what transpired is that Mr Mantach went across and was employed by the Liberal Party in Victoria. He is alleged to have defrauded the Liberal Party of Victoria of $1.5 million. They apparently did not know about Mr Mantach's issues in Tasmania. Senator Abetz knew, on his own admission, that there were irregularities in relation to Mr Mantach and his use of the credit card in Tasmania, but somehow that information was not properly communicated to the Liberal Party in Victoria. At the very least, Senator Abetz owes an apology to his Victorian Liberal colleagues and to the party members in both Tasmania and Victoria for treating them like mushrooms.

The other matter that Senator Abetz has to come clean about in the Senate—and I will be raising these issues further as we move through the rest of this sitting year—is that, on his own admission, he knew the real reason that Mr Mantach left his position in Tasmania but he allowed the lie, that Mr Mantach left the Tasmanian division of the Liberal Party for personal and family reasons, to stand for seven years. He made no attempt at all to correct the erroneous record for seven long years, and that says an awful lot about his capacity as an office holder in the Liberal Party.

Question agreed to.