Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely! Senator Smith is right: people by then were marching in the street. The corruption was there for all to see. Mr Connell alleged, under oath, in evidence to the royal commission, that Hawke—being then Labor Prime Minister Hawke—dropped a proposed gold tax after Connell and various Perth high-flyers each donated $250,000 to Labor during an infamous lunch in Brian Burke's office. Senator Gallagher is right: there was an attempt by Labor mates to avoid tax. It was to do with lifting, or not imposing, a tax on gold. There is no question at all here, Mr Acting Deputy President—and, through you, to the gallery—that in the issue that has come before us today Senator Gallagher would have been far wiser to learn the lessons of history to make sure that she did not make a fool of herself.

So here was Connell, in evidence, damning himself and others for the fact that they all got their chequebooks out and gave a quarter of a million dollars to the Labor Party so that then Prime Minister Hawke would not charge a proposed gold tax, which of course would have been revenue for the people of Australia. That was the saddest part of the whole sad litany of Western Australia during that era.

I was asked this morning, because of my interjections at question time, why I had such a keen interest in it. Well, I was in business in Western Australia at that time, and I thought I was the frontrunner for an engineering project for which I had introduced the technology into Western Australia. It was original and it was unique. I engaged the services of experts from the eastern states. I influenced the then minister simply by saying to him, 'Please consider this new, unused, untested technology.' Of course, he then went and got his own consultant engineers in his department to go and check and, indeed, the technology that I had suggested was to become the technology that was used on that project. We went to tender, Mr Acting Deputy President, but I will tell you what I was told behind the scenes. I was told that if I did not use a certain firm of engineers, a certain firm of consultants, a certain firm of electricians, and plumbers, and carpenters, and transport organisations—and, by the way, if there was not going to be a brown paper bag with money in it—I was unlikely to win that tender, despite having been the person who introduced that technology into Western Australia.

We went ahead with our tender and—do you know what?—I was not going to be party to that; I was not going to be party to the corruption and the rot that had become the state Labor government in Western Australia. History records that my company did not win that tender. Another party, which presumably was willing to go down the path of these others, won it. Of course, the wrong technology was put into place and it subsequently failed. So when I speak with some passion about my memory and my recollection, it is not just the $50 per vehicle per annum that we have all had to pay for donkey's years to repay the debt incurred in those circumstances; it is my own personal memory of those times.

The question now becomes: who funded the litigation? The litigation by the liquidator was against the Commonwealth Bank, against Westpac, against NAB—against a consortium of some 20 banks. But who funded that litigation? Did the Commonwealth government fund the litigation? No. The Commonwealth government did not put in a penny. Did other creditors put any money in? No. It fell to the Western Australian community. That court case started in the 1990s. It eventually was dealt with by Justice Owen, over 404 sitting days in 2002-03, and history records that, indeed, he found in favour of the liquidator and the Western Australian insurance commission. That litigation, at the expense solely of Western Australian taxpayers, went on and on.

That brings us to the point raised by Senator Gallagher today, which is the possible involvement of the now Western Australian Liberal-led government and the coalition government here in Canberra. Those of us who know anything about litigation know that in most cases it is a lawyer-led recovery. They will keep going until there is no money left. And that is the situation that was facing the Western Australian government in 2015. If anybody has been listening to this debate, they would have thought that somehow there was a backyard deal being done—