Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Accountability) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) and the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment (Senator Birmingham) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to the conduct of a minister.

The most generous thing I think we can say about the member for Hume, Mr Taylor, is that he is the unluckiest MP in the parliament. The answers today by Senators Cormann and Birmingham failed not only to address what has now become a daily display of failure by Liberal-National Party ministers to abide by the Prime Minister's own ministerial standards—remember, these are the ministerial standards the Prime Minister himself enforces—but also to reassure the public that they are acting in a way that the public would expect of their elected representatives. Paragraph 7.1 of these standards states:

Ministers must accept that it is for the Prime Minister to decide whether and when a Minister should stand aside if that Minister becomes the subject of an official investigation of alleged illegal or improper conduct.

It's the Prime Minister's decision, and what's he done? As Senator Birmingham said in response to a question: 'Zip, zilch, nothing'. He has done nothing.

Today the New South Wales Police Force confirmed that it had launched Strike Force Garrad to investigate the minister's involvement in the use of a false document. This morning in my contribution on the Orwellian named ensuring integrity bill, I was idly looking up the meaning of 'garrad' in the Urban Dictionary. I'm mindful of the President's ruling on functions in breweries, but if you look up the Urban Dictionary, you'll see that it says that 'garrad' means the dumbest—it doesn't use the word 'person'—person in the whole land, and maybe the New South Wales police have a sense of humour and that's why they've called it Strike Force Garrad. So when will the minister be stepped down?