Angus Taylor has refused to answer questions about whether he misled the House when he told parliament he had sourced incorrect figures about City of Sydney travel directly from the council’s website.
Labor on Monday resumed pursuit of the minister for emissions reduction over the origins of a doctored document Taylor says informed a controversial letter he wrote blasting the City of Sydney over its travel spending. But Taylor continued to stonewall, claiming he had already “dealt” with the matters in question.
With parliament in session for the final sitting fortnight before the summer break, Labor moved early on Monday to suspend the standing orders, declaring Taylor needed to explain himself fully to the House by close of business.
While the government fended off the suspension, the opposition followed up during question time. The minister was asked whether he now accepted that he had misled parliament when he claimed – in relation to his letter upbraiding the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, over travel expenses – that the document he quoted from was “drawn directly from the city of Sydney’s website”.
Taylor declared he had dealt with those matters in a statement issued on 25 October, and said “Labor and their mates have an insatiable appetite for gossip and smear”.
The minister then deflected further, saying Labor had signalled its intention to keep pursuing him over the unanswered questions about the doctored document “the very same day that [former NSW Labor MP] Eddie Obeid was paroled” – which triggered a rebuke from the speaker, Tony Smith, who said the question he was asked did not give him scope to answer by “simply contrasting with other examples”.
Taylor has insisted that the figures came from an annual report document downloaded from the council’s website. Metadata, however, shows the 2017-18 annual report was loaded on the site in November 2018 and not altered.
After first accusing Moore of peddling a conspiracy theory after Guardian Australia reported the matter, Taylor later apologised “unreservedly” to the Sydney lord mayor for using the incorrect figures. After the controversy was prosecuted during the previous sitting period, Labor wrote to the NSW police to ask if it warranted further investigation.
The manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, told parliament during the suspension debate that “on all the public evidence” it could not be true that Taylor used figures from a document downloaded from the council’s website, because there was no evidence that document existed. “It simply cannot be true … it doesn’t add up.”
He said it was a “pretty serious issue if a minister thinks that he can say something at that dispatch box that is demonstrably untrue. [Taylor’s] statement to the House was unequivocal, there was no hedging in his statement. Does he really think that the standards of Australian governance are so low now that that’s ok?
“We know from all the public evidence that [the document] didn’t come from where he says it came from, so the obligation is on the minister to tell the truth.”
