David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection, Mr Deputy President. The interjection is: why are they regrettable? They are regrettable because they make reflections upon the Minister for Defence which are unfair, untrue and indefensible.

We are obviously at a point where there is a great public controversy around the circumstances of the Kirkham report and events at ADFA. Those events and those circumstances are well known to all of us. The Minister for Defence at the time of the so-called ADFA Skype scandal made clear his view that it was an error of judgment, inappropriate and unhelpful for a young woman, who was then the subject of certain allegations and certain concerns around the Skype incident which were being publicly ventilated, to concurrently be subjected to various disciplinary hearings. The minister put that on the record then and he has made it plain since that he does not resile from that opinion.

I think it is fair to say that the Kirkham report had some areas in it which made clear the fact that that was a controversial element of what transpired at ADFA.