John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

He did not mince words. He said, ‘And I say this calmly and deliberately: the Prime Minister has lied about AWB.’ I remind the Leader of the Opposition that I was cleared of that charge by none other than Mr Terry Cole. We had the courage and the guts not to hide behind parliamentary privilege in making those sorts of allegations. We had the guts to establish a royal commission—and in my case to go before that royal commission and to have my name cleared from the baseless allegation that had been made against me and against the Foreign Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: don’t come into this place with your confected moral outrage and start lecturing those who sit on this side of the House about standards of propriety. The Leader of the Opposition is somebody who will resort, under parliamentary privilege, to all sorts of character attacks, but when his character is attacked he has the most fragile glass jaw in Australian politics. Everyone is aware of the behaviour of the Leader of the Opposition over the infamous ‘false dawn’ episode. Everyone knows how he harassed on almost an hourly basis the news editors of major newspapers in Australia. Everyone knows how he made the life of many journalists over the Easter weekend a veritable hell, all in the name of trying to extract from them some apology for something that, in the end, was demonstrated to be absolutely correct. The Leader of the Opposition has the most fragile glass jaw in Australian politics. He is the last person to come into this parliament and start lecturing me or any of my colleagues about accountability and propriety.

Of course the government has set aside money for an information campaign in relation to climate change. It was contained in the budget papers. It could not be more transparent than that.

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