Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They certainly will not be disappointed with the member for Gellibrand, or with the member for Chifley, but they will be disappointed with the assistant minister, because, in failing to even remark about the appropriateness of the conduct of the former member for Goldstein, in failing to even deal with the question of whether the Prime Minister was doing anything at all to uphold the statement of ministerial standards, to hold the former minister to the undertaking that he had been required to give, pursuant to the statement of ministerial standards, the assistant minister has shown that, firstly, he is not interested in meeting the legitimate and very real concerns of the Australian people in respect of the ministerial standards, and he has also shown quite an interesting—I think you would have to describe it—reluctance to defend the Prime Minister. It is an interesting reluctance to do anything at all other than to, as I said earlier, throw the Prime Minister under a bus in relation to this issue.

If I were an assistant minister to the Prime Minister, I reckon I would probably want to defend the Prime Minister. I think that that is probably what I would want to do. Mr Deputy Speaker, I suspect that if you were the assistant minister to the Prime Minister, you would also seek to loyally defend the Prime Minister's interest, and yet here we have someone who in fact has been compared to the member for Warringah in the press today as being quite influential in current stirrings in the coalition—current disputation, current unrest and the upbraiding of the Prime Minister recently.

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