Senator BRANDIS (8:00 PM) —I rise this evening to return to a topic I have previously raised in this place—that is, the proper management of the Townsville City Council. I draw the Senate's attention to recent media reports in the Townsville Bulletin regarding the employment by the Townsville City Council, which is a council dominated by members of the Australian Labor Party, of the Labor candidate for Herbert and former Labor member for the state seat of Thuringowa, Ms Anita Phillips. It was revealed on the weekend that Ms Phillips had been on the council's payroll as a consultant researcher for the last four months, only coming off the payroll when questions were asked about the appropriateness of her employment. She was given a position at the council starting on 5 April this year, which was due to expire three months later. At the end of that three months, she was given an additional month's extension, but none of that was publicly known until last week.

In the Townsville Bulletin on Saturday, 31 July, the two non-Labor Townsville councillors publicly raised questions about Ms Phillips's employment. The two non-Labor councillors sought information about the nature of Ms Phillips's employment by the council and the process by which Ms Phillips was hired. The two non-Labor councillors wanted to be sure that Ms Phillips was not on the council's payroll in a nonexistent job. The ratepayers of Townsville have been told that Ms Phillips's position was to `provide project management advice and assistance to staff'. No further information has been forthcoming. The ratepayers were not told what public benefit they would get from Ms Phillips's employment and what assistance she brought to the council that the current staff could not already provide. It is quite clear that Ms Phillips was the beneficiary of a nonexistent job, chewing up time on the council's payroll before the federal election. Let there be no mistake: Ms Phillips's employment was in a nonexistent position created entirely for her convenience and benefit.

It has been disclosed that Ms Phillips was the only person interviewed for this position. Despite the council receiving six other applications and despite at least one other applicant scoring only four points short of Ms Phillips's 41 points in the short-listing process, Ms Phillips was still the only person interviewed. Armed with this information, it would seem that the council was determined to interview only one person for the position: Ms Anita Phillips.

When these questions were raised in the Townsville media, no Labor councillor was prepared to publicly support Ms Phillips. Instead of the Labor Mayor Tony Mooney or his eight Labor councillors defending the decision to employ Ms Phillips, the council's human resources manager, Mr Alan Hollway, defended the decision to employ Ms Phillips. So who is Mr Alan Hollway? As the human resources manager at the council, Mr Hollway is responsible for the recruitment practices of the council and for ensuring proper human resources policies are implemented. You would expect Mr Hollway to ensure that a job is not created or a person is not given a job that cannot be justified.

But ratepayers of Townsville are entitled to be sceptical about Mr Hollway's ability to keep his political opinions and allegiances out of the council's recruitment processes. Astute readers of the Townsville Bulletin would recognise that Alan Hollway is quite clearly a very partisan council manager. We know this to be the case because of Mr Hollway's letter to the Townsville Bulletin editor on 5 June this year, in which he viciously attacked the current member for Herbert, Mr Lindsay, and several other senior government ministers over a number of issues. Mr Hollway is, by his own admission in the local media, clearly a strong supporter of the Labor candidate and is Labor Party partisan.

So after the proper inquiries were made the following was clear: Ms Phillips was the only person to be interviewed for the position, all other applicants did not get a look in and the person overseeing the recruitment process at council is, by his own acknowledgment in the Townsville Bulletin, a Labor Party partisan and an opponent of the incumbent federal member, Mr Lindsay. I remind you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that Ms Phillips is the Labor candidate for Herbert. Here we quite clearly have a case of a manager hiring and firing at the council who obviously wants to help Ms Phillips in the lead-up to the federal election.

To make matters worse, I am advised by a couple of sources within the council that Ms Phillips's employment contract was going to get an additional extension past 27 July, but that plan was knocked on the head when authorities higher up than Mr Hollway realised the inappropriateness and unjustifiable nature of the contract and when legitimate questions about her employment were raised by the two non-Labor councillors. This is nothing short of a rort. A job has been created for Ms Phillips. When it appeared that the federal election would not be as early as some in the Labor Party in Townsville thought, Ms Phillips's contract was extended to help her through to the federal election.

The ratepayers of Townsville honestly cannot be expected to believe that Ms Phillips's contract was a bona fide job when the work that she undertook cannot be identified or justified, when the contract was extended when it became apparent that there would not be an early federal election and when she was the only candidate out of six applicants to be interviewed in the recruitment process by an announced Labor Party partisan. It is quite clear that this is nothing but a job for a Labor mate. Townsville ratepayers' money should not be used to create bogus positions as consultants or researchers by the Labor Party for their mates, let alone for their parliamentary candidates. The mayor and councillors owe it to the ratepayers to ensure that their rates have not been squandered to create a job for Ms Phillips during her electioneering. Placing Ms Phillips on a contract to give project management advice to the council staff is an insult to the staff's professionalism. The ratepayers of Townsville deserve to know exactly what work Ms Phillips did for the people of Townsville while she was campaigning for federal parliament and why they should have to pick up the cost of her employment.