Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this because I feel very strongly that these censures, while I support them and while the conduct is unbecoming, are political pointscoring. I say that because I've tried to censure public servants in the past—in particular, John Skerritt, when he was head of the TGA, for lying to me in estimates. It never got past the community affairs committee. He lied to me on a number of occasions throughout Senate estimates, but I couldn't get that off the ground. That was a serious issue.

I also called a press conference a couple of weeks ago, when we were down here for the last set of estimates, because I wanted to talk about some very serious issues. One was that we've got a former politician that hasn't been named by the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, who said that this politician sold out Australia. For some reason the two major parties don't want to discuss this at all, and I feel this is a very, very serious issue.

We've got other issues that occur all the time, and instead we come into this chamber every sitting week and start engaging in political pointscoring. Don't get me wrong, this behaviour is unbecoming. But, ultimately, as they say, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. We have genuine, serious issues out here, which people don't want to discuss, where hardworking Australians are being damaged by actions of their government.

I urge the chamber to stop political pointscoring for a change and start dealing with issues. One, in particular—this hasn't yet been brought to the Senate's attention; it only came up in estimates—is that Treasury hasn't mentioned that they haven't updated their tax agreement with Ireland since 1983. In 1983 Ireland had a tax rate of 40c in the dollar. It's now got a tax rate of 12½c in the dollar. Billions of dollars are going offshore—