Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion to take note of Senator Dastyari's statement. There have been a number of speakers from the government, One Nation and, now, the Nick Xenophon Team. I thank all those people for their contributions, but I think a number of things need to be said about this matter.

The first point I'd like to make is that the opposition has been arguing, for more than 12 months now, that this whole issue of foreign influence and foreign donations needs to be dealt with by this parliament. In order to facilitate that debate, my predecessor in this role, Senator Conroy—and this morning we've heard Senator Brandis speak glowingly of the position that Senator Conroy took in respect of foreign policy—when he was the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, came forward with a way of dealing with the issue of foreign influence and foreign donations in this country. He proposed, more than 12 months ago, a piece of legislation which would—had it passed this parliament—have dealt with many of the issues that we've been talking about today.

I'd like to refer to some of the things that are in that legislation. One of them is to reduce the donation disclosure limit from the amount that the government has set for it, of $13,500, to $1,000. The government has routinely resisted this. Under the former Labor governments, the figure had been more than $10,000. It was Prime Minister Howard who reduced it from $10,000 to $1,500. Significantly, the bill that I introduced and that is before the parliament would prohibit foreign donations from occurring. The Labor Party believes that we need to deal with this issue and we need to deal with it promptly.

I appreciate that there have been some changes on the other side in terms of the area of Special Minister of State, but, for now more than nine months, we have heard that the government is on the cusp of bringing forward a piece of legislation, and it hasn't appeared anywhere. The Prime Minister routinely issues a press statement saying: 'We've got a piece of legislation and we're about to introduce it into the parliament.' Attorney-General Brandis keeps saying: 'Yes, we've got a piece of legislation and we're going to introduce it into the parliament.' The suggestion was that this legislation was going to be introduced in the spring session of the parliament. Well, it's nowhere to be seen. Of course, as we know, Prime Minister Turnbull is so frightened of his own shadow he didn't even call the lower house of parliament this week, so there was no prospect whatsoever of any legislation from the government on this issue.

This morning we've seen Senator Dastyari rise in this place and indicate that he is standing down from his position as Deputy Opposition Whip in this place, and he's done so as a result of the issues that have been raised in the press over the last couple of days. I'd like to contrast Senator Dastyari's actions this morning with the actions of the government whenever it's confronted with actions which might be considered to be worthy of resignation. Can I go back to the events of a couple of weeks ago, when we saw that the offices of the Australian Workers' Union had been raided by the Australian Federal Police. Prime Minister Turnbull and Minister Cash made a big song and dance about all of this. But what did we discover on the ensuing day? We discovered that, after this raid had been authorised, somebody had leaked to the Australian media that the raid was about to occur. We didn't know who it was, but there was speculation. In fact, Prime Minister Turnbull called Senator Cash and her media adviser, Mr De Garis, to his office and said, 'This leak that enabled the media to get to the offices of the Australian Workers' Union even before the Federal Police had arrived—is there any chance it came from your office?' Senator Cash emphatically denied that it could've come from her office, and Mr De Garis also denied that it could've come from Senator Cash's office.