Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister, and it follows the one I asked him previously and his answer. Of course he knows that Coronation Hill in those circumstances is no precedent for the position he is adopting now. I refer also to the government’s exclusion of findings on ministers’ competence in the discharge of their responsibilities from the Cole inquiry’s terms of reference and now the government’s gagging of officials in Senate estimates hearings, a step they did not take in the previous Cole royal commission nor the HIH royal commission. Prime Minister, isn’t this arrogant abuse of power all about protecting the Prime Minister and the five ministers now embroiled in the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal? What do you have to hide, Prime Minister?

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