Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is the advice back from the Clerk referring to Minister Conroy’s laptop computer showing that he was sending questions as a witness and then being asked the questions as a witness, having given those questions out. It says that this kind of scripting of committee hearings would certainly fall within the category referred to in previous advices—referring to the advice I sought with regard to the Leader of the Opposition and the Grech or OzCar affair. It says:

This kind of scripting—

this is referring to the Senator Conroy and Senator Cameron incident—

of committee hearings would certainly fall within the category I referred to in the previous advices. It has the tendency to mislead a committee, the Senate and the public as to the real nature of a committee hearing because the questions would not be asked by a senator of a minister or officer but in effect asked by the minister and officers of themselves for the purpose of providing the information the minister wishes to provide rather than the information the Senate or the committee wishes to seek.

That goes to manipulation of evidence at a Senate hearing, which is the same principle the Rudd government is calling on in the OzCar affair to go to the Privileges Committee. Both of them strike at the heart of the integrity of the Senate and at the heart of manipulating evidence at Senate hearings. You cannot support one without the other. You cannot look after one of your own mates and claim, ‘Well, one’s not as bad as the other.’ They both strike at the heart of the integrity of the Senate.

Let us keep it honest. You will see from my motion, which is still to come up, that the key to this is part (c) of that motion, which proposes that both the OzCar affair and the Senator Conroy laptop affair go to the Privileges Committee. It proposes to refer the following matter:

(c)      whether the Senate’s Privilege Resolution No. 6 setting out matters constituting contempt needs to be reviewed, specifically, to cover matters arising from—

the so-called OzCar affair and the Senator Conroy laptop affair. Both these are worthy of going to the Privileges Committee. I urge all senators to think extremely carefully about that motion.

I will now circulate an amendment I propose to Senator Evans’s motion, which is now before the chamber. My amendment will add words to the end of that motion and I will speak to the amendment now so people will have time to look at it. What I want to do quite clearly is to make sure that we do not just have the OzCar affair on its own going to the Privileges Committee, because that could be playing partisan politics. Having both of these issues, which have been publicly raised, going to the Privileges Committee will allow the committee to look at them both with the aim of seeing whether privileges resolution No. 6, setting out matters constituting contempt, needs to be reviewed specifically to cover matters arising from those two issues. I now move my amendment:

At the end of the motion, add “in relation to the hearing of the Standing Committee on Economics on 22 October 2008, whether there was a manipulation of the evidence in relation to the scripting of questions asked in evidence before that committee and, if so, whether any contempt of the Senate was committed in that regard”.

Senator Evans mentioned that having things drafted by the Clerk of the Senate therefore meant they were beyond reproach. The issue about the Clerk of the Senate and the advice on the Senator Conroy affair quite clearly show that that falls well within the issue of misleading a committee and needs to go to the Senate Privileges Committee. So let us get real, let us cut through the bull and have both of them going to the Privileges Committee. Then, once and for all, let us get the issue settled about manipulation of evidence at Senate hearings. I urge all senators to look at this proposal. Both are worthy of going to the Privileges Committee.