Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity tonight to refute some comments that were made about me in my role as Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs. The community affairs committee, as senators will no doubt be aware, has had a series of difficult references in the course of the last 12 months. One of those references was into the Transparent Advertising and Notification of Pregnancy Counselling Services Bill 2005. That bill dealt with proposals to regulate the advertising of pregnancy counselling services and with the funding by government of services that are, in the language of the legislation, objective and nondirective. Although these issues deal extensively with truth in advertising, inevitably they raised issues, during the inquiry, associated with abortion.

The report of the community affairs committee was presented to the Senate on 17 August. On 20 August, an article appeared in the Sun Herald newspaper under the heading ‘MP who felled abortion ad bill funded by lobby’. The article went on to suggest that a donation of $30,000 from the ACT Right to Life Association to the Liberal Party had assisted me in my 2004 election campaign. It went on to comment that, as chair of the Senate community affairs committee, I had used my casting vote to veto a private member’s bill of Senator Natasha Stott Despoja’s.

I want to put on the record in the Senate that the report in the newspaper was untrue. I did not receive a donation of $30,000 or indeed any amount from the Right to Life organisation. It is true that a donation was made by that organisation to a number of Liberal candidates in the ACT Legislative Assembly election that was held one week after the federal election in 2004, but that was an amount that was quarantined. It was directed not even to the Liberal Party in the ACT but to 10 specified candidates.

To its credit, the Sun Herald did acknowledge its error. It published on 3 September a retraction and apology in relation to the earlier article, and I thank the Sun Herald for being prepared to acknowledge its mistake. However, I was disturbed that some correspondents with me were, notwithstanding that retraction, misled by the claims that were made on 20 August. One of those, Ms Kate Mannix, of Sydney, had made a submission to the inquiry and had been a witness at the inquiry hearings in Sydney. I am aware that she sent an email on 21 August in which she repeated the false allegations concerning a donation from Right to Life. That email was sent to a number of honourable senators who are or were then members of the community affairs committee. That correspondence—or, at least, some version of it—was sent by email or letter to the Prime Minister, presumably repeating the false assertions.

I am not sure if senators saw the retraction and apology of 3 September but, in any case, I want to take this opportunity to draw it to their attention. Unfortunately, Ms Mannix was not prepared to accept either my assurance that the claims were false or the Sun Herald’s retraction and apology. She continued to assert in email correspondence that I had benefited from a $30,000 donation from the Right to Life organisation and that the donation had skewed the Senate inquiry into the bill. She also asserted that I should have stood down as the chair of that committee. She went on, incidentally, to claim that the ACT Legislative Assembly Liberal candidates at the October 2004 election were in breach of the ACT Electoral Act 1992 by failing to personally disclose the donation; but, in fact, I have had assurances from the ACT electoral commissioner that in his opinion the $30,000 donation by Right to Life had been properly disclosed under the terms of the ACT’s legislation.

My purpose in raising these matters tonight is to assure the Senate and anyone who might have seen these false allegations, either in the newspaper or in correspondence with Ms Mannix, that the assertions are indeed false and without foundation. I will have more to say on this subject when the Transparent Advertising and Notification of Pregnancy Counselling Services Bill 2005 comes on for debate.