Ms GILLARD (3:56 PM) —There is one simple point at the heart of this debate: you do not have to tell untruths to protect our borders; the two things are not related. What this government did in relation to the claims that asylum seekers threw children overboard is quite clear. For the first time—this is certainly not the same advice his national party director Lynton Crosby was trying to give the Australian community—the Prime Minister admitted today, crystal clear, that the last election was fought on the issue of border protection. That was the only issue on which this government sought to win because, as we all know from the Governor-General's speech earlier this week, they had no other third-term agenda.

What we now know is that a central claim on the question of border protection—a claim that ran in the newspapers for many days over the course of the campaign, that fed the talkback radios, that people would raise with candidates standing in the election—was untrue. The Prime Minister in his speech does not seem to understand the nature of honesty. His limited defence is that when he first made statements about asylum seekers throwing children overboard he believed those statements to be true. That might have been right on 7 or 8 October, but what it does not explain is his standing mute day after day, failing to correct a claim central to the main issue of the federal election campaign that he knew, or people around him knew, or should have known, was untrue. He preferred Australian people to walk into polling places on election day still having in their minds something that was untrue. Honesty does not just require you to tell the truth. Honesty in a political context in an election campaign also requires you to correct untruths. Today the Prime Minister in his defence today has not addressed any part of the second point: the question of addressing untruths.

The three ministers involved in this—the Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and the former Minister for Defence—are doing the reverse of the three wise monkeys. The three wise monkeys would see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. These three ministers did a complete reverse: they saw no good, they heard no good and they refused to put out, when they knew it, what was going on. They were in the loop; they were the ones in the centre of it. Yet they are asking us to believe that, as the weeks rolled by in the election campaign, they did not know that a central claim that they had made was untrue. It is simply inconceivable.

When we look at the way in which these claims were used during the election campaign, this was not just a small matter; this was a whole of government response; this was a whole of government conspiracy. Everybody was involved in prosecuting these untrue claims during the election campaign. I refer the House, for example, to the statement made by the Deputy Prime Minister on 12 October. He said:

So there is this whole of government conspiracy—they are all out pumping the message—and there is the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia contending that he has been advised that this has happened on multiple occasions. How is that possible? We know it did not even happen once but, no, that does not stop the spin, does it? It does not stop the spin being used. Then there are the elements of the government that like to push these things a little bit harder. On 11 October a federal Liberal backbencher—that is, Senator Ross Lightfoot—did not mind getting into a bit of pushing-out that asylum seekers had thrown kids overboard: we have the report. A newspaper article reads:

that is, the asylum seekers involved in this incident after they were picked up—

We know from the Prime Minister's own mouth it was `an election fought on border security'. We know from the reports yesterday and the things that have happened in question time today and yesterday that the central claim on border security is untrue. We know a government that knows it is untrue does not take any steps to go out and put the truth on the public record. And we know it turns a blind eye while elements like Senator Ross Lightfoot are out there pushing the race button as hard as they can push it. That is precisely what has gone on here.

The Prime Minister would have you believe that he is a tenacious and honest person—someone who has been in politics almost all his adult life, that he has come back from difficulties that required Lazarus with a triple bypass, that he revels in the reputation of being `honest John'. But when you actually look back through the history books, the Prime Minister does not have a great record on the question of truthfulness. I found this clipping—it is a little bit old now—from the Illawarra Mercury of 25 May 1979. The banner headline reads, `Lies, lies, lies'. That related to the claims in relation to tax that were made during the context of that election campaign. It is a little bit odd then, isn't it, that here we are again, all these years later—many years later and the Prime Minister is still with us—and what do we have? `Children overboard: it was a lie'—that is the front page you should have seen before you voted in the recent election.

We have a Prime Minister with form, a Prime Minister whose reputation as `honest John' is comparable to when my friends call me `Blue'. It is a joke. It is meant to imply the reverse. There is also his reputation for being tenacious. I will tell you what the other side of tenacious is: it is that he will do anything, say anything and, as we have seen today in relation to former Minister Reith, sell anyone out to protect himself. That is what has happened today. He will say anything, do anything, sell anyone out. That is where this Prime Minister has been.

Let us come to the details of what went on here. There was a report on 7 October that asylum seekers had thrown children overboard. Everybody was very keen to seize on this report because it fitted in with their theme of the election campaign, it fitted in with what they like to think about asylum seekers and they knew it was going to get red-hot political mileage. So within four hours we had the minister for immigration telling us it was planned and premeditated—and I will come back to that a little bit later—and then we had the Prime Minister telling us that we did not want people like that in Australia, and on and on it goes. We know that very quickly government was informed that this did not happen.

I have not been a public servant but, if I worked in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in the middle of an election campaign, when ministers are out making clear and, I might say, inflammatory statements about the conduct of asylum seekers, and I got a document with a footnote that indicated that there might be no evidence to support these assertions, I do not think I would put it in the waste paper bin. I do not think I would put it in the `I might get to doing that tomorrow' pile. I think I would flick the switch to `panic', run upstairs and go to see Max Moore-Wilton or someone as close to him as I could possibly get. That is what would have happened. A public servant is not going to sit there saying: `Oh, I will square up with John Howard later when it all finally comes out about this. I'll be all right. I'll just have another cup of tea.' That is not what would have happened. It would have been bedlam. We all know that. We know that is what happens when there is a crisis, particularly during an election campaign. But we are asked to believe somehow that everybody in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet knew but that that information did not get through to the Prime Minister. How on earth did that happen?

There is clear evidence that the former Minister for Defence's media adviser was in fact told that there were doubts about the photographs. The Minister for Defence was doing media interviews during the course of the day and released the photographs. Then his media adviser was told that there was some doubt about them, and we were asked to believe the former Minister for Defence when, within 40 minutes, he was back on air, still making claims that this was all true! That was the very celebrated 3LO interview in which he ended up saying, `If you don't believe me on this then you don't believe me on anything.' Never a truer word spoken—even the former Minister for Defence manages to get it right sometimes.

I have never been engaged as a media adviser either, but I am sure that if I were a minister's press secretary during the course of an election campaign and my minister were out doing media and something comes to my attention that a fundamental claim he is making is not true, I reckon I would say to him: `Don't go on air and repeat that claim until we get it checked out. This is dynamite. This is dangerous.' I do not know what sort of media advisers this government employs, but I would have thought that it was just obvious that that is what would have happened next. That is absolutely obvious.

What we are effectively asked to believe is that for the whole election campaign, while all these people were in possession of information about a central claim on the central issue of the election campaign—it was in Defence, it was in Navy, it was in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, it was certainly with Minister Reith's media adviser on 10 October and there is a positive finding that it was with Minister Reith by 11 October—no-one told the Prime Minister and no-one told the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Frankly, the phrase `beggars belief' has already been used but it does beggar belief. How can that be explained? How is that possible?

When you look at the report tabled yesterday you will see that one of the deficiencies in the report is that it chases down what happened with the photographs and it chases down what happened with the video but it does not chase down the central information of who said what to who when—when did you know? And it is not about `When did you know that the photos were not right?' or `When did you know the video was not right?' The issue is: when did you first know that the claims that asylum seekers had thrown children overboard were not true? We have not heard an answer on that from the minister yet. He might give it in the course of his reply.

Can I say in relation to the minister's reply in question time that I really do not know how you have a planned and premeditated event that did not happen. The minister might be able to explain that to me. A planned and premeditated event that did not happen—that is a little bit interesting, a little bit hard to envisage. But the minister knows through some cosmic or psychic energy that he channels that if it had happened it would have been planned and premeditated! I hope he is concentrating on Saturday night's Tattslotto numbers because he must be able to get a bit of information out of the cosmos that is denied to the rest of us.

We are obviously in a situation where this government has not corrected a central untrue claim during an election campaign. You do not have to tell untruths to protect the border of Australia. The government spied on Australians during the course of the Tampa incident. I do not think you have to spy on Australians to protect the border. The government has denied when it has been caught out that these things have happened and it is still in denial today.

Can I say what this all reminds me of? I actually looked this up this morning because the comparisons are just so eerie. I remember very clearly the course of the Watergate affair. Others probably do as well. It was the most celebrated political scandal of the 20th century. In the Watergate affair, on 17 June 1972 five men were arrested trying to bug the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel. While there was media coverage of some of these matters prior to the 1972 election, the full story was not exposed. Richard Nixon won in a landslide. Like the Prime Minister today, who said there was no cover-up, Richard Nixon went on the record and said `I am not a crook'. We all know what happened to Richard Nixon: he was brought down when the truth finally came out. We are in the same cycle here. A central claim in the election turns out to be a complete untruth. It is time to come clean in relation to it. It would be better for you to limit the damage now rather than stagger on with these denials.