Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (Senator Evans) to questions without notice asked by Senator Ronaldson today relating to the code of conduct of members of Parliament.

When Senator Evans was answering my question this afternoon he unfortunately finished off with a comment which I think he will live to regret—that was, that I should go and make inquiries of the member for Flynn in relation to this matter. What an extraordinary statement to make at the end of an answer. What it very clearly indicates is that Minister Evans is treating this matter with contempt. What he should have done today was to say, ‘I will go out, and come back to the Senate at the earliest possible moment, and make sure that there were no Australian government resources, Australian taxpayer resources, used to fund this ad.’

Senator Evans can say, ‘I’m not too sure,’ and ‘I’ll have another look at it,’ but it is very clearly an advertisement by a sitting member of parliament for his conveyancing company. I will not hold it up again, having been quite rightly admonished by the President. I seek leave to table this advertisement.

Leave granted.

This is an advertisement that clearly indicates that this member of parliament is actively involved in his business. That is to a certain extent to one side. It is the utter hypocrisy of the Australian Labor Party in relation to these matters that led to the questions today—their complete and utter hypocrisy. It is all right to go out and openly attack the member for Lyne, but it is not all right when they are pursued about the matter to try to get them to acknowledge that they are doing some work, as the Prime Minister did when he first got in. These questions did not reflect on those matters; these questions clearly asked the government about whether it is appropriate for a member of parliament to advertise his business in the paper. The second question was: were any Australian government resources used to fund these advertisements? When you go out and spend all week and all weekend on all the news services talking about people such as the member for Lyne from the other place, you have to be prepared to accept that if your hypocrisy is as gross as this you will be caught out and it will come back to bite you—as it has in this particular case.

All this coalition opposition wants is the openness and transparency that this Prime Minister has talked about since he was first elected. Where, for example, is the lobbyist register, which we were promised two months ago as an example of openness and transparency? Where is the ministerial staff code of conduct that we have been promised for a month and a half? It is not there. Where is this Prime Minister when it comes to electoral donation and campaign reform? Has he agreed to the opposition’s view that we should get the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to have a thorough look at this? No, he has not. Every time something else comes out about the Wollongong City Council and sex and donation scandals and his friend ‘President’ Iemma in New South Wales he goes along to another press conference and plucks something else out of the air to talk about to keep the press happy for another day and a half. Let us have some openness and transparency from the government.