Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Unlike many people in the chamber and the parliament, and certainly people watching this debate outside the parliament, I've had an opportunity to review the correspondence from Senator Cormann to the President. It makes it very clear that the fix is in as far as the Liberal and National parties are concerned. What happened here, as Senators Wong and Sheldon have outlined, is that under some pressure, confronted with a criminal investigation by Strike Force Garrad in the New South Wales Police Force, the Prime Minister of Australia did the only thing that he knows how to do: he rang his little mate, the Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force.

There were many other courses available to the Prime Minister over the course of this sordid saga, but he chose the only one that he knew how to do, and that's to ring his mate, to exert pressure, to change the story, to make it a different dynamic and to make it very clear to the New South Wales Police Force that this was a matter that the highest elected official in the land was taking a direct and keen interest in. He made that phone call to prevail upon him, to make it clear. That's a very unusual thing for a Prime Minister to do. I'm not sure in Australian political history how often a sitting Prime Minister would have called a commissioner of police in relation to an investigation into one of his or her own ministers. I'm certain that no previous Prime Minister would have done it. I am certain that Prime Minister Howard would not have done it. It's clear to me that the correspondence from Senator Cormann is really just bouncing the direction of the Senate, the order to produce documents.

I think it's very important that those on the crossbenches pay attention to what is happening here today and make a decision about whether the authority of the Senate is going to be respected, whether the role of the Senate is going to be respected or whether it's going to be treated and continue to be treated with the kind of contempt that the government is treating it with. It's absolutely clear that nobody from the government is here to speak in this debate today. It's not for tactical reasons that there's nobody here from the government to speak on this debate. It's not because they're keen to get on with whatever passes for a legislative agenda from this miserable shell of a government. It's because they haven't got the courage to debate these issues. It's because—you can see it in their faces—they absolutely lack confidence in two things. Firstly, those opposite lack confidence in the integrity of Mr Taylor, the member for Hume, and they lack confidence in the story that he's telling the parliament and the people of Australia. Secondly, increasingly, they lack confidence in this Prime Minister. They lack confidence in his approach to governance because they'll have been getting the message back that this is so shonky, this is so bent, this is so wrong that the government's not prepared to provide the details of this telephone conversation. There's nobody here now and there'll be nobody in question time except those with the rebuttals and the glib answers. That is something that former prime ministers would never have done.

This last fortnight of the sitting year has apparently all been about integrity—integrity from a government that wouldn't know integrity if it bit them on the face, integrity from a government that found itself winning an election that it didn't believe it would win. There's an absent legislative agenda, and it doesn't know what it's doing with the reins of government and has no plan to deal with the real issues for the Australian people. The only thing the government feel deeply is a sense of smug entitlement that's about them relying upon their little mates to protect their little interests and preserve this miserable government for just a few more minutes.

There are important principles here of transparency and decency. A telephone call was made that should not have been made. It's always the cover-up, not necessarily the crime, that becomes an unfolding disaster for governments that don't know what they're doing and don't put principle before politics. It was a telephone call that should not have been made. It turns out that the first law officer of the land was present. There must be records of what was said, and, if there are not records of what was said, that is a scandal in itself. What have they got to hide?

Over three months of this sordid scandal unfolding before the Australian people, Minister Taylor won't say where this document came from. He has claimed to the parliament that his office or him—it's not clear to me—downloaded it from the City of Sydney website. We know that is not true. So who did he get it from? It is extraordinary that this has gone on for three months and this character is unable to provide the people of Australia with that assurance. What on earth is a minister of the Crown doing smearing a local government official? What on earth is Minister Taylor doing? I know that big talk about bagging the Lord Mayor of Sydney or whatever other obscure government official Minister Taylor wants to tangle with might be big at the Centre for Independent Studies or whatever obscure ultra-Right organisation it is that he goes to tea with, but what possible public interest is there in a minister of the Crown providing fraudulent, forged and clearly incorrect documents to a tabloid newspaper to encourage a first-page story that is, on the face of it—a three-minute sniff test—demonstrably untrue?

The idea that a local council could spend $16 million on travel is actually logistically impossible. The councillors would have had to have been travelling every day, seven days a week. It wasn't $16 million; the real figure was close to $6,000. This is a bloke who came to the parliament with big promise amid breathless accounts that he was future Prime Minister material. He had apparently Kennedy-esque good looks. I assume they're talking about JFK, not Teddy Kennedy. Breathtakingly brilliant, he was described as. Well it's all come shuddering to a halt. First it was Jam Land and the grasslands catastrophe, where this bloke, when challenged about his private interests on a property brought the environment minister in for a chat, just like the Prime Minister brought the police commissioner in for a chat. Then, through venal self-interest, there was the purchase of water entitlements not properly disclosed, not properly conducted.

These jokers over there spent question time yesterday blaming the Labor Party for the problems they are confronting. This is an entirely self-inflicted catastrophe. It's what happens when you have a culture of entitlement that puts self-interest—your own interest—and the interest of your mates in front of the public interest, the parliament's interest, the interest of you performing your role as a public official. Well, this week—the police will be coming to Canberra to interview Minister Taylor. It is high time that Senator Cormann came clean with the Senate, released the full transcript of this telephone call and behave with the decency this parliament has a right to expect.