Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Federal/State Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It is very unusual that we get a government backbench MPI being put forward. It is several years since it has happened. It was extraordinary what happened in the circumstances. The Treasurer had the opportunity—which he claims to always want—to come in here and have a debate about the economy. But the government decided that that was not what they wanted. They squibbed it and pretended that they wanted to talk about industrial relations. Nobody believes that they are serious; we knew all along that they were not serious about that and that it must be a diversion from something else—and I will come to that in a moment—because if they were serious they would not have given the job to the member for Moreton. What is crystal clear is that if they had been really serious they would not have given the support role to the member for O’Connor. No government that was seriously trying to mount a substantial alternative argument would use either of those people, let alone back in the quinella.

This is an attempt to distract attention from the controversy surrounding the apparent Liberal Party takeover of the Business Council of Australia and Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaign. As I have said on several occasions today, nobody should have any problem with a business organisation choosing to run a campaign during the run-up to an election. We live in a democracy and they are entitled to do that. What we should start to worry about is when we find it being taken over as a de facto Liberal Party campaign, and we know that a number of businesspeople are really concerned about that. I know that a lot of Australians would be concerned if they discovered that to be the case. Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald was the so-called secret plot to wreck the Labor Party, which is:

... alarming some business leaders who fear it will be overtly political.

…            …            …

One concerned business figure, believed to have been approached for support, said it read more like a Liberal Party strategy than a business campaign …

And why wouldn’t it? Look at who has written it. It has been written by all the senior operatives of the Liberal Party. It has been written by Mark Textor, Lynton Crosby and others with impeccable Liberal Party credentials.

We have even had alternative propositions, different strategies, being floated which propose running the business advertisements during the election campaign—and I quote again from the Sydney Morning Herald:

… it recommends keeping the identities of business figures involved secret.

So this is a very serious problem, and we found in question time today those same old tricky answers that we get every time we ask questions of this government about issues until they start to slowly unfold and the facts start to come out. We get people saying, ‘As I am advised,’ and ‘I did not authorise,’ and a tricky phrase: ‘I did not hand over the research,’ which does not actually mean, ‘I did not tell anybody what was in it.’ It just means, ‘I did not give them a copy.’

We are asked to believe that the senior operatives of the Liberal Party have been chosen to run a $6 million-plus advertising campaign for the business community—about which business people are complaining that it looks more like a Liberal Party campaign than a business campaign—but that they do not have a clue about what is in government funded research, even though they are also doing research simultaneously for the Liberal Party. This is the poorest chinese wall in the world, and nobody can believe it to be true for one moment.

The confidential minutes of the 6 June planning meeting for this business campaign, some of which have already been reported in the newspapers today, show that the much-vaunted business campaign that the Prime Minister has been exhorting people to do for some time will be run by Crosby Textor, the firm that works extensively for the Liberals. The file note that went to the meeting stated: ‘The group agreed to appoint Crosby Textor to project manage the campaign. This has been confirmed with Mark Textor.’ So said the file note, but when Mr Textor was approached, he said that they had not been appointed and there had been no confirmed arrangement.

The person who wrote the secret file note for the BCA and the ACCI must have been hallucinating, because they said that this has been confirmed with Mark Textor. Mr Textor did present—surprise, surprise—focus group work for the people planning this business campaign, talking about the ‘emotional perspective’. This is not the sort of background material you would expect, and that business people are entitled to expect, for a campaign in which they are trying to run an alternative factual argument.

Of course, I will not agree with them, because they are putting forward a policy position I do not share. But lots of people run ads on television about things I do not agree with, political and otherwise. That is a perfectly reasonable thing. Who is to complain? But the reports that are becoming clearer and clearer show that, in effect, the campaign is being run by the Liberal Party. We have a question here of how many degrees of separation there are between the government on the one hand and this business campaign on the other.

Nobody will be reassured by the answers we heard in the House today that there is a legitimate degree of separation between the people running the business campaign, the Liberal Party and the government funded research. Those three things are in lock step. It will be of no surprise to anyone if they all wind up saying the same thing. We know that there is a plan for further government advertising on industrial relations—what used to be called Work Choices until some of the polling showed that it was not allowed to be called Work Choices. It might be the same research that we are talking about.

Nobody will be reassured and nobody will be surprised if there is significant harmony between this business campaign and the campaign run by the government with taxpayers’ money. The concern is that last point about taxpayers’ money. If the Liberal Party wants to pay for research and give it to somebody else, that is fine. It may or may or not be an intelligent thing to do, but that is none of my business and it is none of the parliament’s business. But the Liberal Party, more and more, finds it impossible to tell the difference between taxpayers’ money and the Liberal Party’s money and between taxpayer owned assets and Liberal Party assets—for example, thinking, ‘Kirribilli House is my house,’ and that taxpayers’ money is legitimately entitled to be used for research which has no public policy purpose but simply a party political purpose.

Any reasonable set of ministerial standards says that you should not use public resources for party political purposes or private purposes, including that which used, laughingly, to be called the minsterial code of conduct of this government but which turned out to be produced by The Chaserwe thought it was serious, but it was actually Charles Firth who wrote it! He is still running around trying to find a minister to abide by it. He has been going for 11 years and he has not found anybody yet. What do you reckon his chances are? They are not good.

The use of public resources for private purposes is a different matter; that is corruption. We are talking here about the misuse of public resources, firstly, to help the Liberal Party and now, indirectly, to feed in through those Liberal Party operatives to this business campaign. We are finding more and more that there is this stench. When governments have been in power for a long time, they start to get around them a sense of entitlement, a sense that the resources that are provided by the taxpayer are provided to them.

We find it extraordinary that we continue to have these allegations without disclosed investigation of the three Queensland Liberal MPs for allegedly using their taxpayer funded allowances to prop up the party’s state election campaign. There was a story today about one of them paying some money back. I do not think I will have time to refer to that, but we did have one Liberal MP criticising the police for taking too long to conclude an investigation into those backbenchers. It is in startling contrast to the period it took the Australian Electoral Commision to investigate the Prime Minister’s activities. This government has lost its sense of proportion. It cannot distinguish between taxpayers’ money and its money, between its public responsibility and its private interest. It is time for a government with that incapacity to distinguish to go.

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