Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

My comments relate entirely to matters that are on the public record. So we have lots of people who all happened conveniently to be connected to the Liberal Party whispering around the corridors that they have the smoking gun, and as soon as it becomes clear that the smoking gun they think they have got could be blowing up in their faces, they scuttle at 100 miles an hour away from it.

This is not the first time that the Leader of the Opposition has been involved in exercises of this kind, to pump up a case way beyond any content that he has; this is not the first time he has behaved like a grubby opportunist. You will note some interesting examples in the Quarterly essay by Annabel Crabb recently, where he took legal action with respect to the Costigan royal commission and claimed that he had ‘significant evidence that was never produced’. He put out a press release saying that he had serious material to back up this action, and yet the judge in the case—Packer against Meagher—subsequently concluded:

… failure to give those particulars has never been explained. Nor have the particulars ever been supplied …

And then he said of the now Leader of the Opposition he:

… managed effectively to poison the fountain of justice immediately before the commencement of the present proceedings.

Similarly, he claimed to be aware of the identity of a commission staff member leaking material to the journalist Brian Toohey. That was absolutely repudiated by Brian Toohey at that time.

It is not only the Leader of the Opposition who has form in this respect; it is the entire Liberal Party. Somehow the paths of the Liberal Party and dubious documents, forgeries and information that does not stack up just keep crossing. They keep weaving into the single stream time and time again. We all remember the ‘children overboard’ affair. Another case of Chinese whispers, as they are called, where the gossip, the innuendo, goes round in circles and it gets ever more hysterical, ever more florid, ever more off the point and ever more inaccurate, and then it emerges in public debate as if it were fact when of course it clearly is not. We all remember weapons of mass destruction—not just an effort by the Liberal Party, I hasten to add, but something they embraced enthusiastically without really being too careful to worry about whether there was any factual information to back up the assertions.

More recently we remember the activities in the seat of Lindsay in the last week of the last federal election campaign, where Liberal Party activists, including people very senior in the Liberal Party, were caught red-handed distributing fake leaflets. And of course, most recently and most pertinently, the Leader of the Opposition in South Australia, Martin Hamilton-Smith, produced into the public domain documents alleging the most extreme corruption by the South Australian Premier and others and then discovered, much to his embarrassment, that these documents are false. Somebody eventually has to teach people in the Liberal Party that you actually check before you make assertions of these kinds. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt here in assuming that you yourselves have not been the authors of this document. I am open to being convinced otherwise, but I am prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt, but at least you should check.

We have a pattern of behaviour here that is unconcerned with evidence, unconcerned with truth, unconcerned with fact. It does not matter if you are the Young Liberals at the ANU, it does not matter that much if you are playing in the sandpit. But when you are Prime Minister or seeking to be Prime Minister, as the Leader of the Opposition is, it is an entirely different story. The Liberal Party tactics committee is slowly turning into the newsroom of the National Inquirer. Next we are going to have B-52 bombers found on the moon and Elvis alive and well in Montana. That is what is happening to the Liberal Party. And now we are seeing the backdown. Now we are seeing the grand retreat. Now we are seeing: ‘Uh oh! It’s blown up in our faces; we’ll just scurry away like the cowards we are. After having made these extreme accusations in the public domain, we are now going to run away, not even move a censure motion.’

There is other material in the public domain which tells you a lot about the grubby opportunism of the Leader of the Opposition. I remind everybody in the House just of the simple facts associated with his involvement with the HIH disaster. One, in 1997, along with Rodney Adler, he explored the prospect of buying HIH and decided that it was not a good purchase. Two, he was paid $1½ million to help FAI find a buyer. Three, he advised FAI not to get an independent valuation of its assets. Four, he wrote to Goldman Sachs—the Leader of the Opposition wrote to his employers in New York on 7 September 1998 saying that the true net value of the assets of FAI was about $20 million. It was then later sold to HIH, partly on his advice, for $295 million, and that played a central role in the collapse of HIH and we all know the misery, the loss that that caused around the Australian nation. And in June 2006, as the House will also know, the liquidator of HIH issued legal proceedings against the Leader of the Opposition, claiming, amongst other things, that he had misled the non-executive directors of FAI.

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