Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Brandis knows full well that he has an opportunity to debate this point. Unfortunately, in question time, he cannot answer questions. That is the problem. The most extraordinary thing about this saga is the extraordinary lengths that the government, from the Prime Minister's office down, have gone to to avoid this issue: failed answers during question time; the behaviour of Senator Ian Macdonald with the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation and References Committees; the appalling behaviour that occurred in the committee today; and countless other examples of how this government has sought to avoid dealing with this matter. The simple issue here is that there is an important matter of public scrutiny when a government goes out and refers to myself and the shadow Attorney-General as asking contemptuous questions, and when it turns out that the very basis of those questions was, indeed, accurate. And this government avoids four question times to hide their contemptuous behaviour!

I am not surprised that Senator Brandis is trying to avoid exposing how outraged Ms Bishop must have been when she discovered what had occurred here. I had asked very simple straightforward questions in Senate estimates about the handling of this letter. She went way overboard in, firstly, suggesting that anyone was claiming there would have been a different outcome to the Sydney siege and, secondly, in suggesting that we were claiming that this letter might have changed that outcome. There were no contemptuous questions on this matter. Indeed, Senator Brandis himself, during estimates, did not even imply that there was anything inappropriate in those questions. But the information provided to Ms Bishop obviously ramped up this issue so far that she thought she could claim in question time in the House of Representatives that there had been contemptuous behaviour from the opposition in this matter. Well, there had not been. And now we know, courtesy of Mr Thawley, that the only contemptuous behaviour here was this government's failure to correct the record when it became very clear on that Monday that the information that Ms Bishop and, indeed, Senator Brandis had was false. This lies with the government. This lies with their problems with scrutiny and their use of public servants to cover their actions. (Time expired)