Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

by leave, this inquiry has been a farce from the outset. The usual role of the Economics Committee is to scrutinise government legislation and to hear the views of the Australian public and offer amendments to the House of Representatives. But, because this government is devoid of any economic policies or economic plan of their own, it decided to look into an opposition policy. That's fine, but the manner in which the government, the Treasurer and the coalition members of this committee have run this inquiry is an unprecedented abuse of parliamentary process and committee processes and undermines the standing of the Economics Committee in the community.

The procedure that the chair established when this inquiry started was for his own website to be set up to take submissions. His website had an official look; it had a coat of arms and it said that it was authorised by the Chair of the Standing Committee on Economics. But then it had articles on that website attacking the Labor Party, our policy and Kerryn Phelps. If you put a submission in to the House of Representatives Economics Committee through that website, it was a pre-filled-out submission. All you had to do was add your name, and that was a submission to the House of Representatives Economics Committee. This means that roughly a thousand of the submissions to this inquiry were written by the chair, the member for Goldstein. They weren't written by members of the Australian public; they were written by the chair! And then, as a condition of submitting your views to the inquiry, you were asked to tick a box to say that you would sign a Liberal Party petition against Labor's policy—an unprecedented abuse of parliamentary process.

Then we found out that the website was partially funded by Wilson Asset Management, a company that has a vested interest in ensuring that Labor's policy does not get up. We then found out that Geoff Wilson, the principal of Wilson Asset Management, colluded with the chair about establishing the inquiry and the dates and venues at which it occurred to make sure that they could get some of their investors, who had a vested interest in seeing this policy go down, to turn up to the hearings. And the hearings just happened to coincide with investor meetings of Wilson Asset Management. Then, after the first hearing of this inquiry and after Wilson Asset Management had appeared before the committee, we found out that the member for Goldstein, the chair of the inquiry, has shares in Wilson Asset Management. The member for Goldstein, the chair of this inquiry, has a vested interest, a financial interest, in seeing this policy go down.

Mr Tim Wilson interjecting—

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