E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2GB
WEDNESDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2019
STEVE PRICE: Thanks for your time.
MARK BUTLER: My apologies for earlier, Steve, thanks for having me on.
PRICE: That’s parliamentary business, we know that. Is it likely again to be raised in Question Time today by you?
BUTLER: Well I can’t go into our tactics but there are very serious questions for the Prime Minister and the Minister to answer. Firstly the mislead of Parliament and the circumstances in which the Minister found himself in possession of these false figures. But now we’ve got a very serious question about the Prime Minster’s judgement in making a call to the New South Wales Police Commissioner about a live investigation concerning one of his Ministers.
PRICE: When did the opposition find out that the New South Wales Police intended to investigate Angus Taylor?
BUTLER: Well the story broke literally minutes before Question Time, a matter of single minutes before Question Time yesterday, so 2-5 minutes before Question Time, as I recall.
PRICE: It went up online on The Guardian website –
BUTLER: And the Daily Telegraph website as well. It was both of those. And look it was a very short statement from the New South Wales Police as I recall it. They made it very clear that because the investigation was now underway, they would not be providing any more information. In spite of that very clear statement from the police the Prime Minister then went and made a phone call to the New South Wales Police Commissioner. Something that only this morning Malcolm Turnbull said – these are my words, not his – it was pretty unwise, it was a call that he would not have made. Because it’s always, to use Malcolm Turnbull’s words, “critically important that in any police enquiry, particularly something that involves a politician that police are, and are seen to be, acting entirely free of political interference.”
PRICE: This enquiry by New South Wales Police was prompted by a request from Federal Labor.
BUTLER: Well we’ve obviously been looking at the circumstances of this forgery very closely and it came to our attention that there was the possible commission of a number of offences under the New South Wales Crimes Act. It is a crime to make a forgery used in this way, it’s a crime to use a forged document knowingly for this purpose and it’s also a crime not to report the existence of a forgery like this to the New South Wales Police, so it’s obviously our responsibility on becoming aware of that to report that to the New South Wales Police. but the point I make Steve is that it doesn’t matter where the report comes from, whether it’s from Federal Labor, or the City Council itself or some other concerned citizen of New South Wales. The obligation then on the New South Wales Police is to make a judgement, an assessment about whether the circumstances warrant formal investigation and that’s the decision that was made yesterday by the New South Wales Police in launching Strike Force Garrad to investigate these circumstances. So I know the Prime Minister made something of the fact that this was a complaint referred by Federal Labor but I think that undermines, really, the objective nature of the decision taken by the New South Wales Police yesterday.
PRICE: Your argument yesterday in Question Time largely focused on, if a Minister is the subject of a police enquiry they should stand down, but that’s not always been the case, has it?
BUTLER: Well I just look to the evidence at a federal level, Mal Brough stood aside when he was the subject of a police enquiry. Malcolm Turnbull, as Prime Minister then, Arthur Sinodinos stood aside. He wasn’t the subject of a police enquiry, he was the subject of a New South Wales ICAC investigation into water, he stood aside. Sussan Ley was the subject of a departmental investigation into travel expenses, she sits right next to Angus Taylor now, she was made to stand aside by Malcolm Turnbull. Now we have a Strike Force launched by the New South Wales Police and the Prime Minister won’t have this Minister stand aside. It’s just unthinkable that the standards have slipped so far just since Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were Prime Minister, not to mention all the other Prime Ministers –
PRICE: Is my memory not correct though that Craig Thompson stayed in the Parliament when he was the subject of a police enquiry?
BUTLER: We’re talking about Ministerial Standards here, we’re talking about the obligations on Ministers of the Crown exercising extraordinary important power as Ministers.
PRICE: So only Ministers should stand down not all general MPs?
BUTLER: Well these are standards that apply particularly to Ministers. The standards are promulgated by the Prime Minister of the day, they go back a very long way applied by Labor and Liberal Prime Ministers alike. At a federal level, no-one can think of a precedent when an investigation of this gravity, a police strike force, has been allowed to take place with a Minister continuing to occupy their job. Now all were saying is he should stand aside during the currency of the investigation.
PRICE: What do you think happened with this document?
BUTLER: Well there’s only one thing we know didn’t happen. Angus Taylor has assured the Parliament that he directly downloaded this information from the council website. Now the council has provided the metadata evidence that shows that can’t be the case. Because they uploaded the report with the real figures as far back as November 2018 and it hasn’t been changed since then. There’s very clear evidence about that. The publicly available Internet archives, one of which is Trove, run by the National Library, and another one, also confirm that the only version of the report that has been on the Internet over the course of 2019 has the real figures. Not the dodgy figures. So what we do know is that Angus Taylor has misled the Parliament in assuring us, time and time again, including as late as this week, that he directly downloaded those figues from the city council website.
PRICE: We’ll have a look at it on Question Time again today. Mark, I appreciate your time I know it’s been very busy with all those divisions, thanks a lot.
BUTLER: Thanks, Steve.
ENDS