Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law) Share this | Hansard source

Lyndon Johnson once told a colleague of his that he was planning to make a particularly serious allegation against a political opponent. He was asked: ‘Is the allegation true?’ The reply was: ‘I don’t know but I am going to enjoy watching him deny it.’ It is the oldest political tactic in the book that we have seen from the opposition over the last week. ‘It does not matter if there is no truth to the allegation; it does not matter if there is no evidence; but we will make the allegation and we will watch them deny it. We will throw some mud and we will make it stick. We will throw some allegations and we don’t care if they are true because we do not care about integrity.’

We have seen this from the opposition over the last week. The opposition’s case has had two parts. Firstly, they said the Prime Minister had misled the House and they said that the Prime Minister should resign. They base this on the existence of an email, and we just heard the Leader of the Opposition say, ‘We asked legitimate questions. We said that there were matters to be answered.’ This is what he said:

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have used their officers and taxpayers’ resources to seek advantage for one of their mates and then lied about it to the parliament.

There is no question mark. It is a statement from the Leader of the Opposition that the Prime Minister had lied.

We just heard the Leader of the Opposition say that we should wait for the outcome of the inquiry. There was not any such reticence last week when he called for the Prime Minister to resign. Now the opposition are saying that this email is a distraction, the very email they were basing their entire case on last week. They have been running away from this email at a million miles an hour.

We saw the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition this morning saying that Senator Abetz, a Liberal Party senator, only raised this email after he had read it in the paper. We know that it appeared in the paper the next day. I am not much of a gambler, Mr Speaker, and I am not much of a horseracing man, but I might start if I could take Senator Abetz with me. He knows the racing results—

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