Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

This report is based on a so-called analysis of the Fair Work Australia report into the Thomson affair, a report the Special Minister of State asked the committee to examine. Neither the AEC nor the committee was given the full report at the beginning of the inquiry. It was only because I asked the general manager of Fair Work Australia at the hearing that we received one of the annexures. When I asked Mr Nassio for his draft report, he said, 'Oh, I thought you would have it.' That is annexure M, and the annexures to M are, as I said, three boxes filled with thousands of pages of material—which the AEC has not had to this day. It pretended that it could analyse the Slater & Gordon-BDO Kendalls forensic report in 48 hours. Mr Nassios took just under three years to produce his report on the Thomson affair. The AEC took eight days to do a so-called analysis of the incomplete report. The committee chair, in his tabling speech, tried to mislead the House by saying that he had given that annexure to the AEC. It was after the event. We had no ability to ask questions of the AEC because he refused to call for a further hearing with the AEC.

This report, with the exception of the dissenting report, is not worth the paper it is written on. And, if the government pretends that this is somehow a justification for introducing anything that is in the annexed suggestions, as the AEC commissioner called them, it would be an absolute disgrace, because at no stage did the committee take evidence on any of those issues—none of them. It was all about trying to get to the bottom of what Fair Work Australia said.

Now, the KPMG report that came in, which the government put around and touted, said that this somehow diminishes the report of Mr Nassios from Fair Work Australia. If what that report said is applied to the AEC, then you see just how deficient the work of the AEC is at the present time. So this government should get off the back of the AEC and insist that it do its work properly—and, if it has political points to wage, it should do so on its own and not try to bring in a government agency which itself has an act that it should probably administer.

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