Stuart Robert Fadden, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer
3:50 pm
Mr Speaker, I wish to make a personal explanation.
Milton Dick Speaker
Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented?
Stuart Robert Fadden, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer
I do, once more.
Stuart Robert Fadden, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer
In the House today the Attorney-General and Minister for Government Services said that I knew that robodebt was unlawful and continued to defend it. That is not the evidence of the royal commission and not the evidence I gave to the royal commission. In the royal commission, I made the point that, after a few weeks of being sworn in, on 4 July 2019, with misgivings about the scheme, I asked for legal advice. No legal advice had been provided to the government or to me before or at that time. Four months later, when that legal advice was provided by the Solicitor-General, within two hours I walked into the Prime Minister's office and stopped robodebt. That is the evidence I gave. Whilst I held substantial misgivings about the scheme, I am not a lawyer, and the idea that a non-legal trained minister who thought there was a problem would stop something that had been running for four years and that had been through cabinet and an election is naive at best. They are the facts, and they are not in dispute.