James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The standards of the organisation that you fund are the standards that you accept. What we heard in question time today was essentially a failure of the Labor government to properly condemn the EDO for their actions. It was also a failure of this Labor government to commit to withdrawing the funding for the EDO. Therefore, you can only assume this Labor Party government accepts the standards that the EDO have put on display not just in relation to the case in the Northern Territory but across Australia.

The Environmental Defenders Office have defiled environmentalists across the country through—one of my colleagues used the phrase 'shenanigans'—their spiv-like, shonky, charlatan-like behaviour. If it was a private business, the EDO would be sold up and the administrators would be appointed. Instead, it is being kept alive notwithstanding the serious issues of misgovernance and—I'm going to say—malfeasance within the organisation. It's being kept alive because the taxpayers of Australia are funding this organisation to the tune of millions of dollars.

I'm very proud to say that the Liberal and National parties will not fund the EDO. We will stop funding the EDO. We believe that the taxpayers of Australia are doing it pretty tough at the moment because (a) they've got a Labor government, (b) they've got a Labor government and (c) they've got a Labor government—but in particular they've got a Labor government who have suddenly discovered, thanks to the Labor Party secretary doing a bit of research, that there's a cost-of-living crisis out there. Everyone's been doing it tough for a couple of years. They're working longer hours. Everything is costing more. They've got a Labor government who are hiding in the Canberra bubble—or the Canberra world, as I like to call it—and not understanding what's going on out there, and they see that their taxes are being spent to fund an organisation called the Environmental Defender's Office. Justice Charlesworth said the EDO's evidence was 'so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on it'. Justice Charlesworth went on to say the EDO was involved in 'distorting and misrepresenting evidence, and, furthermore, they manipulated and coached a number of traditional owners'.

I certainly hope that, when the legal matters come to an end, any legal practitioners who were involved in this matter are taken before the relevant professional bodies of the state or territory with a view to their practicing certificates being removed, because any legal practitioner, or anyone who has spent a couple of days in law school, will know that the conduct of those lawyers within the EDO is the conduct of people who should be on the other side of any legal framework—that is, they should be the defendants rather than the council defending them. It is actually shameful what these legal practitioners have done. It is not just the misuse of money; it is the misuse of their power as lawyers. They are people who are supposed to defend the rule of law, but instead these legal practitioners have done everything in their power to defile the rule of law and to defile any Australian who may have an interest in how our society is governed. For that reason, the EDO should be defunded and, in an ideal world, wound up, sold up and put in a rubbish bin.

Question agreed to.