Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to senators’ interests and ministerial responsibility.

It took six questions to get there but finally we got Senator Minchin interested and wound up. What did we get? We got: ‘Let’s slur everybody else because we cannot defend our own standards.’ That is fine; I am happy to debate that, but what we had is: ‘The only defence we have got against the failure of our government to have standards is to say, “Other people do it too.”’ That is the only defence he had. Earlier Senator Minchin gave a very spirited defence of his factional mate Senator Santoro. They have been close for a long time. The Prime Minister has been close to the senator for a long time. Why? Because they keep beating up on the small ‘l’ liberals, the wets, inside the party. Their factional loyalties saw Senator Santoro promoted to the ministry, and no-one claimed he was promoted on merit. No-one on that side of the chamber said it was based on merit.

Putting that to one side, we have the leader in the Senate, Senator Minchin, defending his mate—a very spirited defence—and trivialising completely the offences that Senator Santoro has confessed to. Senator Minchin dismisses it all as a minor problem of failing to declare his interests and says that we all ought to move on. He has been sacked as minister. There is no problem. There is nothing else that anyone ought to worry about. Senator Scullion said he has paid the highest price of all, when explaining that people who misrepresent their financial dealings who are social security recipients actually go to jail. I think some of them would think they paid a bit of a higher price when they got jailed. But the key questions are—

Government Senators:

Government senators interjecting—

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senators on the other side will want to raise all these other issues and that is fine, but the question is: why didn’t the Prime Minister become open and transparent with the public when he discovered Senator Santoro’s conflict of interest? Prime Minister Howard had the opportunity to issue a press release, mention it publicly or insist that Senator Santoro come clean. But in October, when he was told of Senator Santoro’s clear breach and clear conflict of interest, he said, ‘Just fix it up quietly, put in a return and don’t you worry about it.’ So two months later Senator Santoro updates his declaration but, interestingly, is it a full and frank declaration? No. Does it come clean on when the shares were bought? No. It deliberately set out to mislead about when the shares were purchased, and the Prime Minister was involved in that declaration. In fact, the Prime Minister’s office a couple of days later had to get him to fix it up because he confessed to share trading, which is another clear breach. So the PM’s office fixed that up as well.

But why didn’t the PM come clean when his mate came and said, ‘I’ve breached your guidelines’? He had the opportunity to make a public statement. He had the opportunity to ask Senator Santoro to come into the parliament. He had an opportunity to ask Senator Santoro to make it public but, no, he asked him to put in the fix, put in a declaration, which was not open and honest and transparent, a declaration which sought to mislead about when the shares were purchased submitted two months later. That is what John Howard says are the high standards of accountability for his ministers. What nonsense! And we have Senator Minchin trivialising what has occurred.

As with Senator Lightfoot’s previous dealings, I accept that mistakes can be made. Senator Lightfoot came in and said he had made a mistake on a previous occasion. I accepted the fact that it was an honest mistake on the basis of his declaration, but 72 failures to declare shares, 72 failures to remember that he was trading in shares, are clearly not inadvertent; clearly there was an attempt to set out to mislead. That has got to be taken seriously.

I am pleased to hear that Senator Santoro will come into this place eventually and make a personal explanation, but there is a lot of ground he is going to have to cover. The test for him is not only that of a minister; the test for him is as a senator: whether he is fit to hold the office of senator—that is, whether he has complied with the requirements of a senator or whether he has set out to deliberately mislead the Senate. It is a very serious charge and a charge that can be fairly laid against him at the moment. He has to prove why he should not be judged to have deliberately misled the Senate and then be assessed on that. (Time expired)

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What we are witnessing today is a classical example of the Australian Labor Party saying, ‘Do as we say, not as we do.’ The Leader of the Government in this place, who sought to lead the charge and assault on Senator Santoro and the government today, presided over—

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I’m not the Leader of the Government, actually.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition in this place presided over the state secretaryship of the Labor Party in Western Australia and knowingly used Labor Party funds to pay off the gambling debts of a Labor Attorney-General so they would not become public. That is the standard that Senator Chris Evans brings to this debate. And that was before he got into the Senate. It is something he has never apologised for. A question needs to be asked of Senator Evans: would he accept that standard for an Attorney-General in a Labor government? The fact that Senator Evans has never apologised for that is a message loud and clear to the Australian people that he would deliberately cover up the gambling debts of an Attorney-General, the first law officer of the state of Western Australia, so that the Labor Party would not fall into disrepute.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s all in the public arena.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is all on the public record now, after the event. It shows the two-faced nature of this approach. Having earned his stripes in these sorts of deals, he was then moved into the Senate. I remember that, when I was sitting on the other side and Senator Evans was sitting on the government side, he was seen as one of the leading lights—one of the up-and-coming Labor lights. Where was he when we had discussions in this place about the then Treasurer, Mr Keating, failing to lodge his tax returns? There he was: defending Mr Keating. Where was Senator Evans when Senator Richardson failed to disclose a registrable instrument, being a director of a commercial radio station? There he was: defending Senator Richardson. They are the sorts of standards that Senator Evans brings into this debate. Mr Deputy President, if you want to come into these sorts of debates, you have to come with clean hands, and Senator Evans’s are as filthy as they get.

Mr Deputy President, I say this to you: to err is human. We all make mistakes. The test is not whether we make mistakes; the test is how we deal with those mistakes when we are confronted by them. Senator Santoro resigned. Senator Campbell resigned. From the Labor Party, Mr Kelvin Thomson resigned. The only person that has not resigned is Mr Kevin Rudd, who deliberately sought to sup with Brian Burke for his own personal political advantage. Make no mistake: the reason the Australian Labor Party has now continued with this assault is a desperate attempt to raise a smokescreen so the media will not continue to ask what Mr Rudd was doing at breakfast, lunch and dinner with Mr Brian Burke. The excuses Mr Rudd has come up with to date simply do not wash. They are not honest. I withdraw that. They are not believable. The reason they are not believable is that the email trail has now come out, and it has exposed the excuses of Mr Rudd as being absolutely implausible.

If Mr Howard, the Prime Minister, is to be responsible for an improper share disclosure by Senator Santoro, possibly those opposite could tell us the responsibility of Morris Iemma for his ministers’ activities, which I will not go into in detail. What about Premier Carpenter, in Western Australia? What about Premier Lennon, in Tasmania, whose minister is currently facing criminal charges? Let there be no doubt that the Labor Party do not come into this debate with clean hands, nor would they apply the standards they profess on their own state Labor premiers, which shows once again how shallow, how hollow, they are. All they do is continue the lie of that paragon of virtue, Senator Richardson. (Time expired)

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of answers given by Senator Minchin during question time today. We all know that the Prime Minister wants to draw a line under events surrounding Senator Santoro and his lack of compliance with both the Senate rules and the ministerial code of conduct. Of course he wants to draw a line under these events. The Prime Minister himself said that they are embarrassing. He said himself that he is angry. Of course he does not want the scrutiny that we are obliged to apply to his behaviour along with that of the former Minister for Ageing. Of course he does not want us to look at what has occurred but, unfortunately, that is what we are obliged to do.

It is important, in these circumstances, to look at the time line of events leading up to 3 pm last Friday. The declaration on 6 September by the former Minister for Ageing stated that there were no shareholdings held by that minister. It would seem that at that point the Prime Minister and his office did not take the opportunity to ask any questions. They clearly did not use the opportunity to look at that declaration. On 27 January 2006 Senator Santoro was sworn as a minister of the Crown. At that time he had a responsibility for arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions. According to what he has said to the media, he owned a package of shares in CBio, a company which is investigating pharmaceuticals in the use of arthritis. The ministerial code of conduct said:

Ministers are required to divest themselves, or relinquish control, of all shares and similar interests in any company or business involved in the area of their portfolio responsibilities.

At around the same time, when he became a minister, the minister would have had to declare his financial interests on the Prime Minister’s register of interests for ministers. He said that he overlooked the CBio shares when sorting out his listed portfolio to comply with ministerial requirements, so the shares were not declared to the Prime Minister at that time. We also know that he says that he has divested himself of other packages of shares that he thought did conflict with his ministerial responsibilities. The question that has to be asked is whether he advised the Prime Minister at that time of the divestments that he made of packages of shares which he has acknowledged were in conflict with his ministerial responsibilities.

We also know that, in August 2006, CBio announced that its government supported study had delivered a significant new anti-inflammatory compound which could provide new hope for arthritis sufferers. At that time, there was a range of media commentary about the success of CBio. It is unbelievable in the extreme that the former minister did not twig to his ownership of CBio shares at that time. These successes were very widely reported. They were reported in the mainstream media, and they were reported in the medical journal Lancet. As we know, Senator Santoro had responsibility for arthritis. He would have received, through his ministerial office, relevant clippings. If he read the clippings saying that CBio had been enormously successful, surely at that point he would have twigged to the fact that he had, in his ‘bottom drawer’—to use his own words—a set of shares.

More important is the role of the Prime Minister. Why did the Prime Minister not ensure that the register was correct in October 2006 when the minister said he owned the shares? It is inconceivable that he did not ask the minister if he had any other shareholdings. Why did the Prime Minister cover up and not immediately require—at that point, in October 2006—that the register be changed? (Time expired)

Grant Chapman (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The central allegation of the Labor opposition today in the Senate is what we just heard in the concluding remarks of Senator McLucas—that is, the Prime Minister covered up Senator Santoro’s failure to disclose his share trading activities. This allegation is absolutely unproven. There is not one whit of evidence to support this scurrilous allegation by the Labor opposition against the Prime Minister. On the contrary, the Prime Minister made clear to my colleague Senator Santoro his obligations both as a minister and as a senator. With regard to CBio, the Prime Minister required the disposal of those shares immediately he became aware of the situation. The Prime Minister also ensured the correction of the declaration when he became aware that the declaration was not accurate. When the Prime Minister became aware of further matters regarding Senator Santoro, he required Senator Santoro’s resignation. So this allegation against the Prime Minister is absolutely ludicrous.

The fact is that Prime Minister John Howard is the first Australian Prime Minister to establish a public ministerial code. It did not exist prior to the election of the Howard coalition government. It was this Prime Minister who introduced that code and, in the context of this particular situation, has ensured compliance with that code. In a letter to Senator Santoro on 27 January 2006, the Prime Minister set out in a very explicit and detailed manner Senator Santoro’s obligations as a minister. The same letter also outlined Senator Santoro’s obligations as a senator. There was also correspondence from the Prime Minister and discussions between the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff and the minister and his chief of staff in which the minister’s obligations to both the Senate and the Prime Minister were made very clear. It has obviously been found that Senator Santoro did not comply with those obligations, and he has paid the ultimate price as a direct consequence. He has been forced to resign as a minister. Senator Santoro will be making his own comments to the Senate later today in the adjournment debate. We should perhaps wait to hear what Senator Santoro has to say in that regard.

Earlier, in question time today, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Minchin, detailed a number of state Labor government ministers around this country who have been sacked as a result of their nefarious activities. I say ‘state Labor governments’—not just one state Labor government but several: in Western Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania. Do we see the Labor premiers of those states accepting responsibility for the behaviour of those ministers? No. The ministers have been sacked, and that has essentially been the end of the matter. This allegation against the Prime Minister simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

Senator Santoro has acknowledged that he was in breach of the rules of the Senate, and he has resigned. The Prime Minister responded in the strongest possible terms, expressing his anger and disappointment regarding this issue, and the mistakes have been dealt with. As Minister Abetz said a few moments ago, Senator Santoro resigned; Senator Ian Campbell resigned in the circumstances with which he was faced; even Labor’s shadow Attorney-General, Mr Kelvin Thomson, resigned over the letter of reference which he wrote for an acknowledged criminal. But of course, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, has not resigned, despite his association with a nefarious convicted criminal, Mr Burke, the former Premier of Western Australia. Mr Rudd had three quite explicit meetings with Mr Burke during which no doubt Mr Rudd was seeking Mr Burke’s acquiescence and support in moving into the leadership of the Labor Party. Mr Rudd has refused to resign as a result of that very clear association.

The allegations made against the Prime Minister with regard to this issue are hollow and quite unsubstantiated. They do not stand up to any test. They contrast markedly with the Labor Party’s attitude to their own. They do not come to this debate with clean hands in any sense, as Minister Abetz said. The issue simply does not stand up to scrutiny, and the charges are unproven. (Time expired)

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am really disturbed at the way the government responds to the legitimate questions of the opposition in relation to the behaviour of a minister of the Crown, clearly and flagrantly in breach of the Prime Minister’s code of conduct. I know that the public hate these sorts of matters, but they do expect the opposition to pursue the government in relation to these sorts of matters in an appropriate way—and that is what the opposition has been doing today.

But what have we seen in defence from Senator Abetz and Senator Chapman? They have been dipping into the mud bucket and trying to throw the mud at whomever they think it might stick to. They have been trying to raise the hoary old chestnuts about Kevin Rudd—matters that he himself revealed months ago, which the government only recently decided to dredge up because it thought that there was a political advantage. The fact of the matter is that the public do not like this sort of behaviour from the government. We can see that the reaction of the public to this sort of behaviour has been to mark down the Prime Minister.

What have we asked in relation to the Prime Minister’s actions? We asked why, when he first became aware of Senator Santoro’s flagrant breach of his prime ministerial code of conduct, he did not make it public and indicate that he had required certain action, and, indeed, why he did not dismiss Senator Santoro then. He dismissed former Senator Jim Short from his portfolio because he had ANZ shares—shares that somehow impacted on his portfolio—and now the Prime Minister has the temerity to come out and say, ‘Maybe I should not have even done that.’ The only credible actions that the Prime Minister has ever taken were the dismissals of Jim Short and Brian Gibson from their portfolios because they breached the code. Subsequent to that, it was almost impossible to find a reason to dismiss a minister under the Prime Minister’s ministerial code of conduct.

In this case, when the truth finally came out, there was no choice—and all of this against the background of the government’s attempt to besmirch the name of the Leader of the Opposition for base political purposes. With the claims of occurrences in other states, the government has effectively been saying, ‘Because there are problems elsewhere, you have no right as an opposition to raise matters here in this parliament.’ I can assure the government and the public that the opposition will be raising matters, particularly where ministers breach the government’s own code of conduct—a code which, as I understand it, existed in the cabinet minutes under a Labor government and was observed. After trumpeting the code of conduct and trumpeting that there would be a new standard of government, this government has ignored that code for the best part of a decade after finding it inconvenient to have to enforce it against its own ministers.

In relation to Senator Santoro’s actions in particular areas in which there may have been a conflict of interest when he was a minister, I found it amazing that, as an aside during a press conference, the Prime Minister effectively said to the then yet-to-be-sworn new junior minister, Mr Pyne, that he was giving him the charter of investigating the case. Talk about policy on the run by the Prime Minister! And now we hear from Senator Minchin that, in fact, an investigation was underway. What does that mean? Does it mean that the Prime Minister was making it up as he went along; that he had no idea what was going on; that he was trying to get a glib answer to deal with a question from, I might say, my namesake on The 7.30 Report? Is that all the Prime Minister was doing? Why would you as the Prime Minister make a decision such as that on the run? In fact, why didn’t the Prime Minister make a decision earlier to order an independent investigation into all of the actions of Senator Santoro so that we could all be sure that a conflict of interest was not motivating decisions that this minister made when in office? It is, frankly, an unbelievable proposition to think that the government has not considered this. The public expects that there will be proper activity by this government in relation to the ex-minister’s answers so that we can all be sure that the buck can stop— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.