Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Brian Burke? I thought there might have been another Premier or a minister. These were Labor Party politicians who went to jail. They were crooks, yet the Labor Party and the Greens in this chamber want to remind us about that. That I cannot understand.

I do not have the detail as well as the Attorney has, but he has repeated it so often to this chamber that even I can have an understanding of some of the issues. It was all about WA Inc., where money was owing. There was a liquidation. The liquidation had gone on for 20 or 30 years. Some lawyers had been paid small fortunes—millions of dollars—in dealing with the distribution of the few assets that remain from some of the WA Inc. companies. The Western Australian government was trying to make sure that the maximum amount available could be paid to creditors 30 years later. That is what the Western Australian government was doing. At one stage, the Commonwealth became involved because the tax office was involved. The evidence clearly shows, you do not need me to repeat it and you do not need Senator Brandis to repeat it again—the evidence is there, it is in the Hansard of the committee hearings that I have read—that the tax office went ahead and did what it was going to do. The suggestion that somehow the Commonwealth was going to miss out on money is just so ludicrous. I cannot understand the Labor Party except if you come back to my original premise that it is this constant attack on Senator Brandis, who, as I say, is one of the best attorneys-general I have seen in this parliament in the 27 years I have been here. He is a man with impeccable legal knowledge, a man whose precision and detail are beyond reproach. And you have these amateurs from the Labor Party and the Greens thinking they will make their mark in life by trying to find a chink in his armour—people who failed in state parliaments, failed in Tasmania, failed in Queensland. They could never make their way there, and they hope that they can do something in this chamber by raising these issues.

I appreciate there are a lot more important things to be discussing today, and the Senate really should get on and do them. We have had this farce this morning of the Senate taking a lot of time—and I apologise to the Senate clerks. Obviously the Labor Party has imposed on the Senate clerks to write out all these questions to ask and these motions to put. It was wasting the time of the Senate clerks, of the Senate committees area, to put up this series of questions, which I listened to earlier. Senator Brandis has answered every single one of them—I might say for about the third or fourth time.

The issue has come up about the parliamentary privilege of legal advice. That is an uncontestable proposition. As the Attorney has said, as anyone who has been around parliament for a long while knows, you cannot run a government if the legal advice is made public. That is something that governments since 1901 have been adopting. It is something that governments around the world do. It is uncontroversial. It is not contestable. And yet we have spent so much time here today arguing about this.

As I say, there are more important things to be dealt with. I just felt compelled to enter the debate when I heard the previous speakers carrying on about things they clearly know nothing about. They are desperate to try and find a chink in the armour. They are desperate to try and bring down one of the government's better performers. All of this continues on. This is the third, fourth or fifth inquiry now and, as I say, Senator Brandis has come out of each one of them not only looking and smelling like roses but actually being a rose. Why the Labor Party and the Greens continue to waste the Senate's time on this I simply cannot understand. I should be encouraging them to continue, because they keep making fools of themselves. They keep looking like spoilt little children who cannot become king of the kids. They take on all of these quite ridiculous inquiries at the taxpayers' expense.

I repeat, in case it has escaped anyone's attention: these so-called inquiries are not Senate inquiries. They are inquiries set up by the majority Greens and Labor. They are manned by the majority Greens and Labor. Most of the hearings are held when the majority know that government members cannot be available because we are involved in other—