Page 191 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2012
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What Dr Bourke’s chief of staff did was find that person to stir up trouble. You can see what happened here. Tony Hodges rang up Dr Bourke’s chief of staff and said, “We need someone to stir up some trouble for us at the Aboriginal tent embassy.” That is the way it looks. Kim Sattler was not answering media questions. This was not a media inquiry. This was a call to Kim Sattler to say: “Stir up some trouble for us. Get all those protesters down. Tell them that Tony Abbott is down at the Lobby Restaurant and let’s get a protest going.” What Dr Bourke’s chief of staff has done is facilitate that stirring up of trouble. And it is naive, I would have thought, to believe that this was simply “Oh, I just need a media contact”. Is that what happened?
I think a number of us can make some pretty clear deductions here, because, when you look at what happened on the ground, Kim Sattler was not responding to media inquiries. We saw on the ABC 7.30 report last night exactly what Kim Sattler was doing. So what we know is that, at the very least, Dr Bourke’s office has facilitated the Prime Minister’s office or a member of the Prime Minister’s office finding someone to incite protests at the Indigenous tent embassy. The question that we have and why we have moved this motion today is we want to know what happened in those phone calls.
Was it simply Tony Hodges ringing up saying, “I need a media inquiry; that’s all I want,” end of conversation and that phone call was referred, or was there more to that? Did Dr Bourke’s chief of staff become aware that what Tony Hodges wanted was someone to stir up some trouble? Because it is quite clear that that was the intent of Tony Hodges, and that is exactly what Kim Sattler did.
Let us not buy into this furphy from the Labor Party that this was just some media inquiry, because what it was a deliberate act by the Labor Party to stir up trouble, and Dr Bourke’s office has facilitated that.
It would appear that this motion will not be supported, because the Greens are saying it is a colossal waste of time. But if you listen—I say this to the Greens—to what the Indigenous leaders of this country are saying and what the Indigenous leaders of the territory are saying, you will hear that they blame the Labor Party for setting them up as political tools. The Indigenous leaders have said that they have been set up. Dr Bourke’s office has been found to have been part of the chain of events that facilitated that.
I will quote from what Michael Anderson said from the Aboriginal tent embassy:
The fact is that somebody tried to gain political mileage here, for maybe, the Prime Minister or the Labor Party itself.
Dr Bourke’s office, his chief of staff, facilitated that. You think that is not an issue? You think that is a colossal waste of time, Ms Le Couteur? Well, we do not. We think people have been vilified. We think people have been incited. We think the Indigenous people of the tent embassy have been used as political pawns. We want to know what role the Labor Party here had in that, and we want to know what role Dr Bourke had in that and what role his chief of staff had in that. I think it is entirely
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