Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the minister's answer.

In those last five minutes of this attendance motion, we heard from Senator Gallagher a slew of insults, a number of personal slights and a real lack of detail that I and the Australian people would have expected from an explanation as to why the Treasurer, Mr Chalmers, told untruths to this Senate when he filed a public interest immunity claim. The most disappointing thing is that the government came into office promising integrity and transparency, but what we've seen has been a series of cover-ups to protect vested interests. This has been a government for vested interests. And the reason that I filed these claims in relation to freedom of information was because I was suspicious that the government for vested interests had inappropriate lobbying from Cbus Super, the superannuation industry and various unions on matters of public policy.

I suspected correctly that this was happening. The FOI request of March 2023 came back with a redacted response in September 2023. Then I filed an order for the production of documents in the Senate, which was supported by the crossbench. I want to put on record my thanks to the crossbench for standing for integrity and transparency in relation to these matters when the government has failed to meet the standards that it set at the last election when it promised it would be an organisation that would stand for transparency and integrity.

In November 2023, the response to the OPD from Mr Chalmers was that the government would not release these files from Cbus to the Treasurer and that there was a public interest immunity claim from the Treasurer which said that a disclosure of the documents sought would provide an unfair advantage into Cbus's private opinions and business affairs, and this would destroy commercial-in-confidence information. We appealed that to the Information Commissioner in November 2023, and we received the outcome in August 2024 and the documents just last week. It took 18 months to get access to a document, which had been provided by Cbus to the Treasurer, which was inappropriate lobbying that had nothing to do with commercial-in-confidence information. This is an incredible position that we're now in, where the Treasurer of the Commonwealth would make a false claim to the Senate—a lie—that there was commercial-in-confidence information provided by Cbus when there was none. The PII claim was falsely made, and the Information Commissioner itself said: 'I do not accept that the remaining material would cause detriment if it were disclosed. The remaining material does not contain commercial information about the fund.'