Mr BEAZLEY (Leader of the Opposition)(3.10 p.m.) —I move:

That this House censures the Minister for Small Business and Consumer Affairs for:

(1)   his abuse of ministerial office;

(2)   having used his public office to secure private benefit in blatant breach of the requirements of the Prime Minister's code of conduct;

(3)   having phoned Mr Nick Greiner, Vice Chairman of Coles Myer to influence a decision to get Target as a lead tenant on the vacant Eaton lot owned by a company of which the Minister is an active Director;

(4)   having failed to disclose the full details of the telephone conversation between himself and Mr Nick Greiner in particular as it related to the Minister's attempts to thwart development on an opposing site;

(5)   his repeated failure to table the letter between his brother and Mr Nick Greiner, written following the telephone conversation between the Minister and Mr Greiner, which provides further evidence of collusion to advantage his private business interests in serious contravention of the Prime Minister's code of conduct;

(6)   having misled the House about his involvement in regard to the Eaton site;

(7)   having, as Minister responsible for retail tenancy policy, directly canvassed a Bunbury City Councillor, Mr John McCourt, about another development or another site owned by him in Bunbury which would give his company a financial advantage in direct breach of the Prime Minister's code of conduct;

(8)   having failed to answer truthfully questions regarding that particular development despite being invited repeatedly to do so in this House this week;

(9)   having, in the words of Councillor Wayne Major, tried to wreck the Bunbury city site leaving the way for Target to go to the Minister's private company Eaton site north east of the city, thus constituting a further breach of the Prime Minister's code of conduct; and

(10)   having misled the Parliament and the public on a number of aspects of his inappropriate approaches to councillors in direct contravention of the Prime Minister's code of conduct which amounts to a contempt of the House; and

calls on the Minister for Small Business and Consumer Affairs to resign immediately or for the Acting Prime Minister to sack the Minister forthwith.

Acting Prime Minister, members, Mr Speaker: it is exactly these circumstances which the ministers code of conduct is supposed to preclude from happening—exactly these circumstances. I am astounded, as I said earlier in the week, about the moral blindness of this government—that they can sit and listen to this 20-minute political suicide note from the Minister for Small Business and Consumer Affairs (Mr Prosser) and be quite unsurprised that it does not include at the bottom of it two extra words: `I resign.'

What the minister fessed up to was active, in effect, day-to-day involvement in the business activities of his operation. What the Acting Prime Minister (Mr Tim Fischer) tried to do once or twice was to selectively quote from the code of conduct to defend himself. I never thought that I would use a piece of correspondence from the Minister for Industry, Science and Tourism (Mr Moore), who we still feel regularly breaches the spirit at least of the matters relating to conflict of interest, to attack a fellow minister of his. But I have to say that Mr Moore, to our great surprise, looks like a knight in shining armour—a black knight, perhaps, being Black Jack—when you compare him with the Minister for Small Business and Consumer Affairs.

The defence of the Acting Prime Minister was, `This is not a public company, which would mean that you would have to get out of it. It is a private company.' Ralsten is also a private company. The Minister for Small Business and Consumer Affairs said, `In my ministerial portfolio I'm likely to find myself, at different points in time, in conflict with my public duties.' So what does he do? He gets Mr Wilde, who is in the same position as Mr Wood in relation to Mr Prosser's interest, to write:

I confirm your agreement with me that while you remain a minister you will not use your shareholding in the company to: (a) remove me as a director, (b) appoint any other director, (c) overturn or interfere with any decision I make in relation to the affairs of the company. I also confirm our agreement that I will not disclose or discuss with you the affairs or activities of the company during the period mentioned above.

Is this a weekly meeting to discuss the interests of the company? Is this a visit to sites, along with your company secretary, to examine your various business interests around the town of Bunbury, or Mr Moore's equivalent in this case?

Is this a document which, if it were to apply to you, indicates regular contact with city councillors to influence their business interests and their business concerns? Of course it is not. It is in fact, if it is adhered to, the appropriate arms-length relationship.

We go back to the beginning here. Remember who you are. You may by now have forgotten, but what you actually are is the minister for small business in charge of, among other things, questions related to the operation of private tenancies. You have everybody who is associated with that now demanding at least your disappearance from the portfolio. That was added to today in the remarks by Lisa Michael in the performance that she put in at the Press Club, making it amply clear what people in the business community think about your fundamental conflict of interest. Let us go through that again today:

Ministers are required to resign directorships in public companies and may retain directorships in private companies only if any such company operates, for example, a family farm, business or portfolio of investments and if retention of the directorship is not likely to conflict with the minister's public duty . . .

It is not without significance that the Acting Prime Minister, when he chose to read out these things, excluded `is not likely to conflict with the minister's public duty' when we invited him to contemplate these matters.

Among these 119 meetings that we can so far discern from what the member has had to say and from what I hear emanating from Western Australia there are going to be one or two councillors whom you did not list during your discourse, your supposedly all-encompassing comprehensive discourse, who will over the next little while make amply clear to you that they have had similar discussions with you and similar approaches. So you, no doubt, will be back in this place on some subsequent occasion and presenting, no doubt, your particular views again about your discussions with them when that occurs.

But let us get to the heart of what has been going on here, because not only do we have here a minister who does not understand his responsibilities in relation to the conflict between public duty and private interest. We do not have just that particular problem associated with it. We also have a substantial problem—

Mr Martin —Come back and defend yourself, you wimp!

Mr BEAZLEY —This is amazing, Mr Speaker. The minister under censure has disappeared from the chamber, where he is being held accountable and we are of course advising him of new information in this regard. This government intend to sit on this scrofulous statement to defend themselves over the next two months. We have news for this government: this matter is now under active consideration for other reasons in Western Australia and it is not going to disappear over the next two months, because there are people who understand thoroughly that their personal business interests have been potentially damaged at least by the efforts made by this minister to use his ministerial office to advance his personal interests. In that process, they have reason to believe in the way in which they have been treated and so disadvantaged that the full weight of the state has been used to support their opponents in a manner that is completely inappropriate and they have new heart and, having new heart, they are going to deal with this problem themselves.

The government cannot face it because the government knows it is canting hypocrisy. The government knows that its code of conduct is no longer worth the paper it is written on. Let me just quote, because I think it sums up exactly the situation of the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) in relation to this, John Laws—I never thought I would often quote John Laws in this House—who said:

In spite of an amazing array of worldwide communications, we seem, really, to have sort of lost our Prime Minister. He seems oblivious to the fact that one of his senior ministers has lied to the Parliament. That's the truth. The Minister for Small Business, Geoff Prosser, has lied to the parliament. That was his biggest mistake. There are others. And he should be sacked. It's all fairly straightforward. Yet, our cricket-loving Prime Minister, obviously a bit miffed about the Test being rained out, appears more concerned with Mark Taylor's average than dealing with a rogue Minister.

What a perfect description: a rogue minister. That is what the Prime Minister should be dealing with. That is the person whom we are dealing with in this censure motion here today.

Haven't we got so much ice to skate on when it comes to the unctuousness of the Liberal Party in relation to these matters in times past! The particular quote of the Prime Minister I used in question time was the Prime Minister's quote in moving a censure on us when we were in government at one point in time about one of our ministers—one of our ministers, I might say, who resigned at the end of it. It stated:

The supreme test of the courage and probity of the Prime Minister is whether he insists on Ministers observing the basic requirement of a minister, that is, that they tell the Parliament the truth.

Do you actually think that this description of the minister's business interests for one second conforms with that paltry little declaration of `Bunbury—various lots' in the minister's statement to this parliament about what his personal interests were? Do you think the descriptions that we now have of conversations with Greiner conform one wit with those initial statements that, `I've had no conversations with any members of the Coles Myer board about these matters'? Do you think that that very high standard conforms with this minister's statement, when pressed to it, that he had had no discussion with any of these councillors or planning authorities of any nature—formal or indeed, as he went over the top when he talked about telephone calls, informal? Do you think it conforms with that? Of course it does not. This is a minister now who has lied, I say advisedly, repeatedly to this chamber.

Mr SPEAKER —The Leader of the Opposition will withdraw that remark.

Mr BEAZLEY —I withdraw. He has deliberately misled this chamber on repeated occasions. He has deliberately misled the Australian people in numerous interviews as far as these things are concerned when he has been asked to explain himself to the press.

The minister has not engaged in that process of misleading without understanding the fact that he confronts some degree of danger himself. When we see the panoply of what has been concealed here, we understand why he does not want to talk to us and we under stand why he does not want this process to be thought through in this chamber and examined and analysed.

Imagine yourself as a small business person out there in the community, particularly if you happen to be a tenant or a franchisee. Imagine yourself in their situation as they sit down and look at whether or not they think they are going to get fair dealing from this man. This is a man who is prepared to phone directors of Coles Myer so as to take out of the normal company planning processes a decision-making process, which would have been essentially highly localised, probably to the level of the local Coles manager, or, if it went anywhere, to the state manager. He gets the most central and powerful section of that company actively engaged—to make sure that there is no backsliding—and turns it on another businessman, the sort of businessman who is not trying to mix his public and private duties and who is pursuing his affairs in the normal course of events as a private businessman. Having sooled Coles Myer national on, he goes back to all his mates on the Bunbury City Council and levers them to activate them and get them going.

These mates on the Bunbury City Council also include the likes of the minister's architect. They are people actively engaged beyond just simple mateship; they are actively engaged in his business processes. He has been sooling them on to his business opponents. The Acting Prime Minister used as a defence, when I presented him with a question on this, that it did not succeed. That is the defence. The monopolisation of the power of the Australian government, combined with Coles central office, combined with all the mates on the council, actually hit a brick wall at the last point of the fence in the Bunbury City Council—where there are a few councillors with a bit of guts to stand up to him. This, of course, obviates any possible error or any possible sin as far as the Deputy Prime Minister is concerned. That is what we are supposed to look at and applaud.

All I can say is that what we can applaud in that regard is the triumph of Australian democracy at the local level. What we cannot applaud is the people who would subvert it, who happen to include the person who is not obeying the ministerial code as far as this exercise is concerned.

It was interesting to see the minister constantly say, `McCourt's a Labor man.' Oddly enough, standing out there saying, `McCourt's a Labor man', they have already named a number of other councillors, who, I can assure them, are not Labor people, as people they have engaged actively in conversation. As I said before, there will be other councillors as far as this matter is concerned because this is by no means a complete piece of work, comprehensive though it may have seemed at first sight. There will be others and there is much more to go as far as this issue is concerned for this particular minister.

The simple fact of the matter is that, oddly enough, in Western Australian politics—I do not expect people on this side of the continent to comprehend this—there is not partisan party politics in local government in Western Australia. Not many people vote in Western Australia either—you get about 10 per cent of the council turnout—but there is no party politics in local government. There are people who are members of political parties who involve themselves but they tend to form wavering coalitions. As often as not, you see groups of people who actually happen to be members of the Labor Party and members of the Liberal Party in one coterie in a local authority opposed to people of a similar mix on the other side.

That is what this minister is running slap-bang into in Bunbury. That is why he keeps his active involvement in these companies. You have to understand that. His companies are 100 per cent dependent for their day-to-day operations on decisions of federal governments, state governments and local governments, but particularly local governments. All three levels of government are constantly making decisions that advantage or disadvantage his companies. He cannot afford, as a businessman who has been actively engaged in some of the most bruising planning battles in Bunbury for years and years, to let go of his connection. He cannot afford to do that because he fears his fortune would disappear. He fears his interests would not be fully protected. That is what his principal concern is about. That is why he cannot let it go.

We have said before in this place that we have no problem with business people in parliament or people with business experience. But at different points in time they have to make choices. The Minister for Industry, Science and Tourism made a choice: `I will remove myself from my private company, Ralsten. I will have no discussions on any of the business activities on a day-to-day basis with my company secretary because I know that, were I to do that, that would place me in a conflict of interest situation. I will trust my fortune to this man. I will take the risk.'

The minister's junior minister finds himself in exactly the same position. He does not exit. He gets right into it. If daily work of a company is actually a timetable as opposed to an expression about close involvement, how could any minister be involved in the daily work unless he actually sets up his ministerial office as his registered business office? We have not yet checked that. If you are going to define `daily' in that form, that is about the only way you could do it.

If you are going to define `daily' in the common sense way—as would everybody in the gallery here, everybody on the Liberal Party backbench hoping for Mr Prosser's position, all of us here on this side of the House and anyone with a modicum of common sense—then that would have to include a description that involves a weekly meeting with your partner, who happens to be your brother and also with your company secretary; a set of regular, or so it would seem from totting up the list, briefings with local planning authorities in relation to his multifarious property developments, including the ones at the heart of this; and an endless series of telephone calls to others associated with the same business. The commonsense approach would tell you, Minister, that that is daily. That is what is meant by daily activity.

So this minister finds himself in this position of a conflict of interest. He is protected by a weak, worthless Prime Minister, by a bumbling Acting Prime Minister who does not know what he is doing, a supine Liberal backbench and a morally blind Liberal front bench. That is what is protecting him, and nothing else. No standards are protecting him, no reasonable interpretation of public duty is protecting him and no basic decency in our political life is protecting him. This government has the lowest standards in politics in living memory. They have demonstrated that here today by this fatuous performance in defence of the minister. (Time expired)

Mr SPEAKER —Is the motion seconded?

Mr Martin —I second the motion, Mr Speaker, and reserve my right to speak.