Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence Industry, representing the Minister for Employment. Will the minister outline to the House why it is important for employer and employee organisations to act in a way that promotes truthfulness and integrity and manages the potential for conflict of interest? Is the minister aware of any deviant approaches?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canning for his question. The Leader of the Opposition wants us to trust him. He wants us to trust him that no member on the Labor side of the House falls foul of section 44 of the Constitution; that not one member of the Labor Party has the sword of Damocles hanging over their head. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we're supposed to trust this guy, the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Maribyrnong. But the Leader of the Opposition has proven in that last 24 hours that he's plumbed new depths. He is quite happy to plumb new depths. He's quite happy now to collude with other political parties, this one in New Zealand, to undermine the Australian government. How many other foreign governments or foreign political parties in other countries has the Labor Party been colluding with to try and undermine the sovereignty of the Australian government? Has he been talking to people in Indonesia; or China, the Chinese Communist Party potentially; or Japan; or the Labour Party in the UK? The Leader of the Opposition stands condemned because he's been prepared to collude with foreign political parties to undermine this Australian government—about which he should be ashamed.

He wants us to trust him. This is the fellow who got $32,000 from Unibilt, a company with whom he had been negotiating enterprise agreements, for his Maribyrnong campaign in 2007—he didn't remember it until 2015, when he had to appear in the Heydon royal commission—or the $27½ thousand that he got from AustralianSuper when he was on the board of AustralianSuper and he was also the National Secretary of the AWU. AustralianSuper gave the money to the AWU to be used in the Maribyrnong campaign, and he never declared his conflict of interest. Just recently we've discovered, after a lot of digging from the Minister for Employment, that in fact when he was the National Secretary of the AWU he gave $100,000 in start-up capital to GetUp! to campaign against his political opponents.

A government member: Did he get approval for that?

We don't yet know whether he got approval for that $100,000. So he takes money from companies for his campaign that he doesn't declare. He takes money from AustralianSuper to be used and doesn't declare his conflict of interest. He gives money to so-called independent progressive community organisations with which to attack his political opponents. Paul Kelly got it right on this bloke:

The distrust between Rudd and Shorten was intense and enduring.

The Gillard camp was contemptuous of [him].

Nobody trusted him.