Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the response—or lack of response, I should say—of Senator Cash in respect of the applications to release these documents. I guess it's pretty interesting to note that months and months and months ago, when the Auditor-General started his investigation into sports rorts 1—I know we're talking here about sports rorts 2—he had no difficulty getting access to all of the documents which the government now seeks to delay tabling before this Senate.

Madam Acting Deputy President Kitching, I think you might have been sitting in the Senate chamber earlier when I was referring to the press release that went out in respect of sports rorts 2. I indicated that, as part of the government's cover-up mentality, spin mentality, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, the press release that had been on the government's website spruiking what we now know to be a fraudulent exercise of rorting and pork-barrelling had disappeared. The government was so proud of this announcement at the time, but, when we went to look it up today, it had disappeared. Well, I can report this to you, Madam Deputy President: somebody in the Prime Minister's office is watching the Senate—it comes as a bit of a surprise that they take any notice of us at all—and guess what? It's back up. It's back on the government's website.

When I spoke on this earlier this morning, about 45 minutes ago, the government, as part of their cover-up, their lack of transparency, their lack of accountability, had taken it off the website, so none of these sports clubs anywhere in the country could look it up and see just how badly they were rorted by this government. But somebody in the Prime Minister's office must have thought: 'Hm, maybe this is not such a good idea. Maybe this looks like a cover-up.' You know what they say about these things: it's not the original act that gets you into trouble; it's the cover-up. Why do we know that? Watergate. Former President Nixon got into trouble for the cover-up, not the original act. Somebody in the Prime Minister's office has been watching and obviously has a little bit of common sense, and they've put that press release back up. The government might say: 'It was there all the time. Senator Farrell was wrong.' But we did take a precaution and we snapped it when it wasn't there. So we can produce some physical evidence, if need be, of the fact that the government had taken it down.

But what this whole exercise, even this morning, shows is that this government doesn't really care for sporting clubs and sporting men and women in this country. In particular, it doesn't care for women's sport, because, if it did, it wouldn't be treating Australians as mugs and wouldn't be treating Australian sports men and women this way. It would be showing them some respect. Everything that the government has done in this whole tawdry saga has exposed the lack of respect it has for sports men and women in this country.

Later on this afternoon—you'll like this one, Madam Acting Deputy President—the new minister is introducing a bill to change the way in which clubs are expected to respond to cheating in sport. They call it the Sport Integrity bill. This bill is intended to say to sports men and women in this country: 'We demand that you improve your integrity. We demand that you apply additional conditions to the way in which you perform your sporting activities because we want integrity in sport.'