Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I will. Senator Dastyari, having spent his allotment of his travel expenses, decided he did not want to have to pay the extra, so he got on the blower and rang a donor and said, 'I'd like you to cover the rest.' What is extraordinary about this is: you have got to have a pretty high level of expectation to get on the phone to someone to ask them to cover off the debt. I do not know if this was the first person he called. Maybe he was up to call 2 or 3, but I suspect it was the first call he made, because he knew and he had expectation that that donor would pick up his personal debt.

The Leader of the Opposition, when confronted by this—what he did not do was seek to get some clarity about the facts of the case. Did he ask the National Secretary of the ALP to give him some advice and sit down with Senator Dastyari and get a clear statement of the facts? No. He said: 'It'll be all right, Sam. It'll be all right. We'll just bludgeon this one out, and they'll all back off.' It came to the point where Senator Dastyari actually decided to resign. As the minister has said, who would have thought that Senator Dastyari had higher standards than the Leader of the Opposition when it comes to these sorts of issues? There was no new information between what we learnt about the facts of Senator Dastyari and the time of his resignation. And I have not heard one thing from the Leader of the Opposition to explain why he defended him one day and then was happy to accept his resignation the next. What went on on that side of the House shows the low standards of this Leader of the Opposition and why he cannot be trusted to impose those standards as a Prime Minister.

Mr Perrett interjecting—

See this speech in context