Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

Four hundred and seventy-eight days ago, Minister Cash was forced to come in to the Senate, to a committee, and say: 'Whoops, I made a pretty big mistake'—she didn't call it a lie—'I made a bit of a mistake. Somebody in my staff didn't tell me the truth.' Well, you know what's been going on for the last 480 days? This minister has not been telling us the truth. Ordinary Australians out there, who aren't like this government, who don't have intimate relations with the top end of town, need great unions to look after them, and, for this government, it sticks in their craw. This is all happening in here today because this divided, out-of-touch, dysfunctional government sought to use the power of government to set up the ROC and, through the ROC, exercise a raid on a union.

But it wasn't good enough that they could abuse the power of government; they decided that they needed some pretty good pictures as well. So what we're seeing now is a court that's actually revealing some of the truth that Minister Cash has been attempting to hide from this parliament. But ordinary people around the country know that there's no way that she wouldn't have known what was going on. She was in on it—everybody knows that. This has been going on for 480 days, and, despite the number of questions that have been put to her today, she just keeps going back to statements she made in the past. One thing I learnt when I was growing up is that, if you tell lies all the time, you'll never remember the truth; you'll never be able to remember what really went on. She cannot tell the truth. She cannot tell the truth, so she's relying on written records of the construction that she's attempted to put before the Senate today.