Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Paterson should walk out in disgrace because he has been part of this misrepresentation all week. By the way, the member for Curtin has been sitting on this pay slip for 11 days. For 11 days, she has been aware of this pay slip and also aware of the misrepresentation she was perpetrating upon the Australian people. What sort of local member—and someone as senior as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition—withholds a pay slip which she is relying upon to launch her attack just so that she can disguise her misrepresentation of the facts? They talk about people resigning; it is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition who should today be considering her position.

Those on that side should take a leaf out of the book of Senator Johnston, who, having raised this once in the political domain—for his own political gain, I should note again—eventually decided: ‘That’s enough; let’s get this out of the public domain. In future, CDF, and in future, Chief of Army, I’ll send you a note. We’ll get together, we’ll talk about it and we’ll resolve these issues privately.’ Why did Senator Johnston say that? It is because he understands how important it is not be having a public and political debate about our SAS soldiers and their personal details and, in some cases, their hardships as a result of things that may have gone wrong in the system or as a result of legitimate recovery.

The opposition continues to run the line that I did not put an immediate stop to the recovery of these debts. Yet I have tabled today—and I am sure they have had a look at it by now—the paper trail within Defence which was the response to my directive, clearly showing that, since October last year, the order was given for no debts to be recovered. Unfortunately, I cannot be absolutely sure that Defence somewhere along the track has not still deducted some money from some soldier—that is the state of the system that I inherited from the former government. It cannot tell me how many soldiers are affected, it cannot tell me how much was deducted, it cannot guarantee me that recovery will not take place but they do assure me—and the evidence is in the paper trail—that my directive was followed and the stop action put into place. So the opposition should stop running this line—this fiction—that somehow I did not follow what I said I would do and put that stop into place.

I do know one thing. I am going to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition’s proposition now. She talks about the lady who contacted me. I did not know there was a link between an email and a phone call.

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