Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of questions asked of Senator Birmingham today. I want to make a couple of comments following on from Senator Henderson's comments. Senator Henderson accuses us of focusing unreasonably on Senator Reynolds. I say to Senator Henderson, who has left the chamber, that our job as an opposition is to hold the government to account. There has been a serious allegation of a crime occurring in the Minister for Defence's office. There are a number of questions about her conduct as a minister—what she did, what she knew, how she followed up, who she told, what action she took—for which she is accountable to this chamber. This is not anything personal about Senator Reynolds, and of course we all wish her well and we were all sorry to hear earlier today of her medical condition. But that does not mean that we do not ask reasonable questions about the minister's conduct and expect to have those questions answered. What we've seen this week and last week, through the five question times that Minister Reynolds has faced questions, is every question relating to her conduct—what she did, what she knew, how she followed up, how she provided duty of care to this staff member in her office—was not answered. We are not going into the ins and outs of what was alleged to have occurred and by whom or anything that the police may be seeking to investigate as part of their inquiries. We have not gone near any of that. We understand that that is an area for police investigation, and we as senators are not here to perform that role. But we are here to hold the minister to account. She is the defence minister of Australia. She is a senior cabinet minister in this government and these are legitimate questions about her conduct, her suitability, her capability. They are entirely reasonable questions to ask.

We in Labor have been blocked. I don't know whether Minister Reynolds is operating under instructions from another office not to answer questions and to block and stall with the hope that this will go away, that eventually the caravan will move on to another issue, because that appears to be some of the strategy. The other strategy could be to provide conflicting information that makes what's happened all very confusing, so nobody really answers, and we keep going around in a circle. We have an expectation that this minister should have probably come into this chamber as early as last Tuesday morning and made a full statement about what she knew and what she did, and that could have avoided some of the questions or some of the blocking of answers that has been going on in question time. But no statement has been provided to this chamber. There's been no statement from the Prime Minister. Can you think of another allegation of a crime occurring in a senior minister's office being dealt with this way, if it wasn't about an alleged rape between two Liberal staffers? I can't think of one where that was the case and where nobody could ask questions, where everything was pushed away until the police investigated and we'd moved onto another story. Well, we're not going to move on, because we think there are legitimate questions about this minister's conduct—about what she knew, what she did—and whether allegations of this crime occurring were pushed aside in the context of a political campaign, to be dealt with at a later time or, quite possibly, not dealt with at all.

This has been going on for two years, and we do not have clear answers from this minister about her conduct and her role in what appears on the surface to be a cover-up of a very serious allegation of a crime occurring in this building under this government. They are legitimate questions to ask. We don't seek to attack Minister Reynolds personally and we haven't, but we will hold this government to account. We will hold this minister to account. There are questions that remain unanswered. If Minister Reynolds is unable to answer them, then Minister Birmingham should, and, I think, as the big boss, the Prime Minister should also front up and provide answers to this chamber.