Topic: Peter Slipper’s suitability as Speaker of the House of Representatives
Lyndal Curtis: Hello and welcome to Capital Hill, I’m Lyndal Curtis.
Just one vote is all it took for the Government to save its Speaker today. Tony Abbott, the Opposition Leader, moved a motion just after Question Time had started the Peter Slipper be removed from his office of Speaker. The Government narrowly won the vote but it could have gone the other way.
Joining me to discuss what is another momentous day in the House of Representatives is Labor MP Stephen Jones and Liberal Senator Scott Ryan, welcome to you both.
We’ll go first to the debate in house of parliament, Tony Abbott argued that the Speaker could not be impartial, that his text messages, which have been tabled in a court case being mounted against Mr Slipper by one of his staffers, James Ashby, showed that he was misogynist and sexist. This is part of what Tony Abbott told the Parliament.
<Clip from Tony Abbott>
Curtis: The Prime Minister had already told Question Time that she found the text messages sent by Peter Slipper to James Ashby offensive, but in her speech she didn’t mount a defence of Peter Slipper, instead she aimed both barrels at the Opposition Leader.
<Clip from Julia Gillard>
Curtis: Stephen Jones, you came within one vote of losing the Speaker today, is Mr Slipper’s position still tenable?
Stephen Jones: Can I say a couple of things? Firstly it’s not for the Parliament to decide whether Mr Slipper has been guilty of some civil or criminal offence. Quite properly that’s something that gets dealt with by the courts. We have seen precedents where parliaments haven’t left it to the courts in the past and Nick Greiner comes to mind. He was convicted and acquitted and in the meantime he was thrown out as the Premier of NSW.
Curtis: But the case that Tony Abbott mounted wasn’t mounted on the case that’s being run in the courts, it was mounted on the details of the text messages that have been put before the court as part of the case.
Jones: Look, the text messages are deplorable and if they are true then I think they rightly stand condemned. I don’t think there’s any right thinking Member of Parliament who would look at those text messages and want to defend them. This is not about defending the text messages, this is about defending due process and if there is to be a termination of Mr Slipper’s speakership then it shall be after the court has fully determined the matters before it.
Curtis: If the Parliament revisits this issue or should the Parliament revisit this issue after the court case is decided? And do you think by then the Parliament will make a different judgement?
Jones: That depends on what the court has had to determine on the matter.
Curtis: But the text messages still exist, they won’t be changed by the judgment of the court.
Jones: I haven’t seen the full picture. I haven’t seen everything in the entire context of all of this. I think the text messages we’ve already seen are deplorable, but there are lots of things that are said between private individuals that they probably wouldn’t be proud of if those things came to public. I don’t defend them. I think there are many Members of Parliament who exchange things between each other in private that they wouldn’t like exposed in public as well. That’s not to sanctify or defend them. I think they are wrong. I don’t do it myself. However, there is a court process under way, we should let it run its course and frankly, to have Tony Abbott stand up there as the champion of feminism today is tosh on stilts. I think the Prime Minister really tore into him and tore into him quite rightly. This guy has got form. He’s Parliament’s number one misogynist and this guy really has no right to be standing there as some faux champion of feminism after all of the things he has said and done in his parliamentary and extra-parliamentary career.
Curtis: We’ll come to those comments in a moment. Scott Ryan, Tony Abbott called on Mr Slipper to stand aside from his post while this court case was being run and welcomed Mr Slipper’s decision when he took it not to sit in the chair while the court case was being run. Why could this motion have not wait until the court case was decided?
Senator Scott Ryan: Well because Lyndal, what was in this morning’s papers was quite frankly disgusting and as you pointed out these text messages are not disputed as facts. Nothing that happens from point on is going to change that.
Curtis: But Mr Slipper’s not sitting in the chair now, he has stood aside from sitting in the chair now. So your MPs in the lower house are not having to deal with him on a daily basis in the Parliament.
Senator Ryan: He is still travelling overseas representing our Parliament. He still holds one of the most prestigious posts in this Parliament all because this Prime Minister and the Labor Party put him in the job and today they voted to keep him in the job.
Nothing that happens over the next few weeks is going to change what we saw today. All we had from the Prime Minister, as Stephen pointed out, were attacks on the Opposition. Lies repeated do not become truths just because they are repeated over and over again. No-one contests what we read in this morning’s paper about the current Speaker Peter Slipper, no-one contests the Prime Minister put him there and today Stephen and his colleagues in the Labor Party voted to keep him there.
Curtis: But the concerns that Tony Abbott raised in his speech about the speaker’s ability to be impartial because of a text message he sent about Sophie Mirabella, an Opposition front bencher on the day he threw Sophie Mirabella out, the concerns that Julie Bishop expressed in the Parliament about having the Speaker in the chair after he’d made the comments he did in the text messages, in the end when the Speaker’s not sitting in the chair those aren’t issues that arise, are they? Why couldn’t it wait until the court case had been decided?
Senator Ryan: Firstly what we read this morning is pretty repugnant. It should offend every Australian and it should offend every Australian that the Prime Minister did not address those text messages specifically when she was attacking the Leader of the Opposition this afternoon. Peter Slipper can walk back into the chamber at any time and sit in that chair and he’s overseas representing this Parliament. He was put there by Labor, today he’s been kept there by Labor and nothing that happens in the coming weeks is going to change what we read this morning, nothing is going to change those text messages. And today Stephen and his colleagues voted to keep him there.
Jones: Can I test these champions of propriety and process for a moment. You will recall a few months ago when the Opposition were trying to alter, through improper processes the balance of power in the chamber. They called upon Craig Thomson to come into the House and explain himself. They didn’t call on him to be stood down, they didn’t call on him to be suspended. They did that eventually, but not at first. They called on him to come into the chamber and defend himself. Instead of doing that this time, these guys act like the star chamber. they read a few things in the newspaper this morning, they think this is going to be a great political stunt. ‘We know, we’ll pull on a suspension of standing orders,’ which is their form for a political stunt, and that’s exactly what it was. Australia sees through it.
Senator Ryan: It’s a desperate Labor Party that brings up Craig Thomson as their defence. The Liberal Party has said over and over again that the Labor Party should stop accepting his vote.
Curtis: I might intervene here with a question. Stephen Jones, your Government put Peter Slipper in the chair.
Jones: The Parliament put Peter Slipper in the chair and the majority of people in the Parliament …
Curtis: You proposed him and voted for him. You didn’t put anyone else up. You put him there to improve your position in terms of numbers.
Jones: Let me take you on there. Harry Jenkins stood down – and this is the correct order of events –Harry Jenkins stood down, he gave an explanation to the House that he was intending to stand down. Nobody’s contested that explanation and then 24 hours late there is a vote. Peter Slipper is proposed as the Speaker and the majority of Parliamentarians support that. So let’s get the facts straight.
Curtis: You could have proposed a Labor Member of Parliament, but instead you proposed Peter Slipper. Here’s a man who has had questions in the past, in the end was it always going to end like this? That questions about Mr Slipper were always going to come back and bite the Labor Government?
Jones: Same answer Lyndal. It is not for me to usurp the role of the courts of this country. I’m a parliamentarian, if I wanted to be a judge I would have pursued my legal career, I’m not. I’m a parliamentarian, you’re a parliamentarian, not a judge, let’s leave it to the courts to determine these things because at least in a court the defendant has a right of reply. He has the ability to lead evidence and to be defended instead of in this place over here where it’s all done on partisan lines, no right of reply, you didn’t give him the opportunity to come and defend himself.
Senator Ryan: Stephen’s had a fair go on this. Stephen, you put him there. If anyone believes the chain of events you just outlined, you can sell them shares in the Sydney Harbour Bridge tomorrow. You put Peter Slipper there and you are accountable personally for your vote today to keep him in that job, as is the Prime Minister. The House of Representatives chooses who the Speaker is, not the court.
Curtis: We might go now to the attack the Prime Minister mounted on Tony Abbott. Stephen, Labor ministers have been attacking Mr Abbott on the grounds that he has a problem with women for some time. Julia Gillard now wholeheartedly joined the attack. Is this something though that is purely politics, that you want to frame him as someone who has a problem with women and that in the end the public would actually rather you concentrate on issues of policy and getting on with the job of running the Government?
Jones: Let’s put this in context Lyndal. This all arose out of distasteful comments that were made at a Liberal Party fundraiser by a Liberal Party champion Alan Jones. We had the Leader of the Opposition, who had the opportunity to do the right thing and Malcolm Turnbull did the right thing, unequivocally, said these were disgraceful comments. Tony Abbott didn’t do that. That was the beginning of these events and Tony Abbott has not, as far as I’m concerned, as far as anybody has been following these events closely enough, sufficiently dealt with the Jones comments. Yes, we should move on and we are moving on and in Parliament today we’re debating a dental bill, we’re debating the carbon pricing legislation, we’re debating some tax and superannuation bills and quite properly we should.
It wasn’t the Government that brought on the suspension today it was Tony Abbott running true to form by running another parliamentary stunt and I think he was hoisted on his own petard.
Curtis: Scott, given those comments by Alan Jones and the reaction to them, should Tony Abbott have used the form of words he did today saying “every day the Prime Minister stands in the Parliament to defend the shame for Speaker will be another day of shame for the Parliament, another day of shame for the Government which should already have died of shame”?
Senator Ryan: Tony condemned the comments by Alan Jones, and do you know what, there’s absolutely nothing that Tony could have said that would have made Stephen and the Prime Minister happy, because in their desperate desire to reflect away from their own record and away from being held accountable for their own broken promises, they are desperate to keep the issue going. This is a standard Labor playbook to always talk about the Opposition, to throw enough mud and hope some of it sticks and keep repeating lie after lie after lie. What the Prime Minister did today in the House of Representatives was absolutely deplorable. She made allegation after allegation, character assassination after assault with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.
Curtis: She did though raise comments that Tony Abbott has made in the past, they were his comments.
Senator Ryan: And we had Labor speakers out there saying that apparently calling the Prime Minister a liar or attacking the Prime Minister for being dishonest is somehow out of bounds. This is a Prime Minister who stared down the barrel of a camera and said she wouldn’t do something and then did the exact opposite in order to keep her job. You can’t run away from accountability.
Curtis: Finally because we’re about to run out of time. Scott Ryan, do you think your side of politics will try again to remove the Speaker before the case is settled?
Senator Ryan: I can’t speak for members of the House of Representatives in this regard, Lyndal. But I hope that we don’t see yet more of the deplorable sorts of things we read this morning come out in the press.
Curtis: And that’s where we will have to leave it. Scott Ryan and Stephen Jones thank you very much for your time. And thank you for joining Capital Hill. We’ll be back tomorrow, until then. Goodnight.