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Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Page: 188

Senator MILNE (Tasmania—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (18:37): Mr President, I rise to say that I will be supporting the dissent on your ruling. The contribution we have just heard from Senator Abetz demeans the processes of the Senate and is a disgrace to the Senate. What must be dawning on his colleagues in this place is a recognition that, if anyone has rushed into a strategic misadventure and overstepped the mark, it has been Senator Abetz in prosecut­ing the longstanding political quarrel that he has with Senator Brown and me, and that in prosecuting that he has overstepped the mark by persuading his colleagues to take this course of action and reference to the Privileges Committee, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. He has overstepped the mark.

It will be occurring to his colleagues that that the Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987 has put this Privileges Committee in the context of a legal framework that requires a standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt and requires that there is no comprehension of bias, let alone actual bias. This has brought the whole matter of how the Privileges Committee operates in this Senate to the fore, to legal attention.

This is a very, very serious matter. I note that Senator Abetz at no stage tried to deny that he is the source of the compiled and annotated time line and chronology which Senator Kroger presented by way of a letter to you, Mr President. We now have a situa­tion where Senator Abetz is accusing other people of petulance and bullyboy tactics. Once again he designed his whole campaign to impugn Senator Brown's reputation, my reputation and the reputation of the Greens more broadly.

He overstepped the mark, as did Senator Kroger and Senator Brandis in the manner in which they approached this last year, in relation to a political donation to the Austra­lian Greens—not to any one senator or group of senators but to a political party. That donation was declared to the Australian Electoral Commission and was on the public record throughout this proceeding. It was a donation made to a political party and registered with the Australian Electoral Commission. You, Mr President, made a decision to allow this to have precedence such that it was referred to the Privileges Committee, and yet you did not do the same when a donation was made personally to a senator—not to a political party but personally to a senator. You chose—

Senator Boswell: Mr President, I rise on a point of order. The reference that the sena­tor is making about me, that I received a personal donation, is untrue. I never received—

The PRESIDENT: Senator Boswell, if there is a need for a personal explanation you will have the opportunity to do it later, not whilst the senator is speaking.

Senator Boswell: I want to just correct, and I know Senator Milne would not want to—

The PRESIDENT: There is no point of order at this stage, Senator Boswell. You will get the opportunity later.

Senator MILNE: As I was going on to say, this is a question of consistency, of consistent application of the Senate rules. I draw to your attention, Mr President, the fact that one only makes a disclosure on the Pecuniary Interest Register when a person has actually received a pecuniary interest. In the case that is before the Senate, the donation was made to a political party and therefore would not appear on the Pecuniary Interest Register of the Senate for any one senator or group of senators.

I think that is something which will be explored and looked at, but the issue here is that we have a political quarrel, a politically opportunistic action being taken by a senator through other senators in his own political party. His attempts to pretend this is petulance and that engaging senior counsel is some peripheral activity are quite wrong. This is a serious matter. The Senate Privileges Committee can jail people for up to six months and impose significant fines. In the legal profession, there have to be those levels of proof. They did not exist, and you, Mr President, ought to have taken that into account before making the decisions that you made in relation to these matters.

This is a matter without substance, but I concur with Senator Brown—as a result of the action that has been taken in this Senate, we will now be bringing forward suggestions on how the Privileges Committee can better reflect the seriousness of this. For example, it is inappropriate that people be appointed to the Privileges Committee on the basis of numbers of political party representation and so on when they effectively are judging people in a judicial context. However, I do not intend to speak at length on this matter, because we would like it to go to a vote. But I do want to put on the record that I am extremely disappointed that, contrary to Senator Abetz's claim that there is money to be had all around, there is a provision in the act for expenses. And there is this notion that Senator Abetz spread around that the Greens have all this money from donations or whatever. Senator Brown and I did not benefit in a pecuniary or personal sense and that matter needs to be considered very seriously.