Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Accountability) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Pyne left the parliament in May, convinced that there was no life left in this government, and even concerned that he would perhaps lose his seat. So he departed. And, as a lifelong political careerist who had never worked in any other capacity, he is the happy recipient of a parliamentary pension that is reported to be worth around $200,000 per annum.

Some have defended that extremely generous pension scheme on the basis that it was an anticorruption measure. We will see, though, that, in his case at least, it hasn't been very effective. I don't begrudge him the generosity of that pension, but we might have hoped that it might be enough. And I should not fail to point out the obvious, which is that a long way from this chamber, in the shopping centres, the mothers groups and sporting clubs of Australia, many Australians—the victims of bogus robo-debt claims, those waiting on NDIS plans to be approved and those literally starving on Newstart or on the age pension—might well think that taxpayers paying $4,000 a week for ex-politicians as sit-down money is a bit rich.

But, as we have now seen, that's not even enough for Christopher Maurice Pyne. His snout seeks out more than one trough. We have to ask, in this do-nothing response, what the basis is of his corporate arrangement. Is it a straight salary? Is there an incentive bonus scheme? Incentive bonus schemes are often very common in the large consulting firms, so we'd have to ask: what is Christopher Pyne going to avail himself of?

Where is his judgement? After all, Christopher Pyne was never one who was shy to point out other people's lack of judgement. He was quite happy being judge, jury and executioner on other colleagues. His behaviour here is of course both a matter of comedy and of legend. Where is the judgement of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison? These are the standards of the Prime Minister. These are the standards the Prime Minister sets for his executive. But this 'move it along, nothing to see here' response is a total disgrace, and it does not bode well for this government. I take Senator Waters' point: if you are a Prime Minister with gravitas, you do not buck-pass to a public servant; you take care of business yourself.

Of course, Christopher Pyne has never had a real job, unless you count his hosting of the surprisingly excellent Pyne & Marles Sky News show, of which I was a regular viewer. The other host, I thought, was quite insightful, and most certainly tolerant! But the answer is clear enough, isn't it? Corporations are willing to pay him because they expect a return on their investment. They pay Pyne X in the hope of extracting a thousand X from his mates in the Commonwealth government. And the sad, terrible truth of this is that they might not even recognise it for what it is: corrupt. It is corrupt. It is a corrupt arrangement.

In their hillbilly, boastful enthusiasm, one of the largest accounting and consulting firms in Australia, Ernst & Young, boasted that they had appointed him in preparation for getting a bigger piece of the Defence outsourcing pie. Over the past few years there's been a boom in outsourcing out of Defence to EY's competitors, the principal beneficiary being KPMG. Senator Keneally went through some of those—the large scale of those projects and that consulting. That's why Pyne was appointed to a part-time job that, reportedly, pays more than his last full-time job, as a cabinet minister.

Normally, it would be my duty to stand here in this place and assert that such corrupt behaviour was the collective responsibility of an admittedly quite thoroughly dodgy government. There have been other egregious examples of government decision-makers finding themselves in highly lucrative post-decision-making sinecures after their terms expired. Andrew Robb is probably the most outrageous of these examples. In his case, it went to such an extent that a former security agency chief had to be appointed to the FIRB. But let's be fair about Pyne: there's no-one on our side of politics who loathes him quite like most of the Liberal Party room, who have had to endure his prissy, sanctimonious, smart alec, backstabbing, constantly treacherous, hateful and despicable ways. Think of the furore that eventuated from his comments at the casino in Sydney, his boastful speech to moderates of the Liberal Party, and think of the consequences that they unleashed.

John Howard made many mistakes in his term of office, but he judged Pyne quite correctly. John Howard judged him to be 'unworthy of promotion'. We now see just how unworthy. They are a remarkable contrast in conduct post office. Mr Howard retired gracefully, occasionally helping his side of politics and writing a sedate but popularly received memoir that settled few scores, and he certainly didn't sell himself to corporate Australia or to foreign interests. Pyne, within weeks of the election, has his snout in multiple troughs. It's a disgrace. It is little wonder Christopher Pyne's former colleagues Mr Pasin; Senator Abetz; and Peter Dutton, the member for Dickson, practically threw him under the bus on a very entertaining segment of morning television. It is little wonder that his former colleagues say that his appointment to EY does not pass the pub test.

It is little wonder his former colleagues are so gun-shy about introducing a national integrity commission. They will spend the next three years trying to avoid it, because they know that former members like Christopher Pyne, who've always believed in little else beyond self-entitlement, would be dragged in as witnesses and be caught in lies and corrupt schemes. Pyne, Robb and countless others could star in a Liberal version of Orange Is the New Blackof course, it might have to be 'orange is the new Liberal blue'! We won't have an integrity commission worthy of the name from this government. They've seen the damage that it can do to governing parties who've lost their way. But I don't think any of those other parties have really got the best of Christopher Pyne, or the worst, because what Christopher Pyne is thinking of engaging in is large-scale defrauding of the Commonwealth. But time will tell.

I'll end by asking why Christopher Pyne, on his social media, is posting photographs of himself walking the corridors of Parliament House. What is he doing here? Who is he meeting? And he gets no benefit of the doubt, because he appears to have no ethical standards whatsoever and no care for his own party, which is drunk on hubris, and this nonresponse is just another piece of proof of their hubristic nature. Above all else, the good of this country depends on government ministers and bureaucrats being trusted to make decisions free of favour and free of obligation or coercion from sleazy lobbyists, like Christopher Pyne, who know their secrets and weaknesses and are willing to exploit them in a series of side hustles. I believe this will emerge as the biggest scandal of this already plagued Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.