Page 182 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2012
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today he table in the Assembly the name of the staff member who referred the PMO to Kim Sattler and in what capacity he made that call and for what purpose.
I do not rise lightly today to seek this information. The first point to make very clear is that this is a very serious issue. The events that unfolded on Australia Day that led to a direct threat to the Prime Minister’s security and to the security of the Leader of the Opposition have caused significant embarrassment on a national and indeed international scale and—I think of great interest to the minister for Indigenous affairs—have used the protesters at the Aboriginal tent embassy as a political tool. We have seen Indigenous leaders involved with the Aboriginal tent embassy come forward to criticise the Labor Party and criticise the actions of the Prime Minister’s office for what they did, and that was to incite the protest, that led to a security threat, for a political end. We have seen that that was what occurred.
What has happened over the last two days is that we have repeatedly asked quite reasonable questions of Dr Bourke, to explain his role and the role of his office in this very grubby affair, and what we have received from Dr Bourke is stonewalling—his scripted responses and refusal to clarify what happened, what his link in the chain was. What we know is that the Prime Minister’s office rang somebody who works for Dr Bourke. We want to know why that was and we want to know who that was and we want to know why that person then rang Kim Sattler.
We saw the direct consequence of that on the 7.30 Report last night when Kim Sattler was shown to be the person who essentially incited the Indigenous tent embassy participants to go and storm the Lobby Restaurant. What was the intent of that phone call that was made by a member of Dr Bourke’s staff to Kim Sattler? And why is it that Dr Bourke is refusing to give us a satisfactory explanation?
Another matter that we want clarified, because he is refusing to tell us who it was, is: was it Mr Garrett Purtill? Garrett Purtill is the president of the Labor Party and he works for Dr Bourke. That leads to a deduction that this Labor Party staffer in the Prime Minister’s office who has tried to incite a political protest, who is obviously motivated for political purposes to attack the Liberal Party, then rang somebody in the Labor Party in the ACT to facilitate that. And we want to know who that is. Who was the person in Dr Bourke’s office who facilitated what occurred? Let us be in no two minds about this: that is what occurred, because if Dr Bourke’s office had inquired about why these calls were being made and had found out reasonably what was being proposed they should have stopped this. But they did not, because the consequence for the Indigenous people in the ACT, and indeed in the nation, has been very negative; there is no question about that.
So the minister is refusing to tell us who took the call and why that call was made, and he is saying that he is not going to name a staff member. But what we have seen from those opposite, both in the media and in the Assembly, is a willingness to name Liberal Party staffers whenever they want to. They are quite happy for John Hargreaves or for Katy Gallagher to go out into the media naming Liberal Party staffers, but when it comes to the Labor Party, they are not going to divulge this very important information, because they are hiding behind the fact that “Oh, we never name staff.”
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