Labor has raised questions about Malcolm Turnbull’s involvement in “secret payments” in the collapse of the insurance giant HIH as the major party leaders clashed during a brutally contested question time session.
With the opposition mounting a persistent political attack on the Turnbull government’s lack of action to protect penalty rates, the government has countered by attacking the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, over deals he struck with big companies while an official of the Australian Workers’ Union.
Last week, the Turnbull government brought forward legislation to criminalise the practice of making or receiving payments that encourage unions to improperly trade off workers’ rights.
On Wednesday, Labor persisted with its daily penalty rates attack and upped the ante, posing a series of questions in parliament about Turnbull’s role in settling litigation after the collapse of HIH in 2001.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, asked the prime minister to confirm whether he was party “to a secret payment to settle litigation, which alleged he personally breached corporations law in the collapse of HIH – a devastating collapse which saw thousands of Australians left with worthless insurance policies?”
Turnbull responded furiously. “The fact that the member for Isaacs stooped so low shows what a raw nerve we have hit,” the prime minister told the chamber.
The prime minister said he had made no payments, “secret or otherwise”.
Turnbull said Shorten was the one who needed to come clean about payments during his time as a union official and he declared the government was “defending workers, you’re selling them out”.
The prime minister then rounded on Dreyfus for not living in his electorate. “Mr Speaker, let’s be quite clear about this. Let’s be clear about this.
“This queen’s counsel often has the opportunity to explore his own electorate but he certainly doesn’t live there. He doesn’t live there. He observes it objectively from a great distance, Mr Speaker, with an imperial equanimity.”
Senior government ministers also chimed in to defend the prime minister.
The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said Shorten was a hypocrite.
“We saw the hypocrisy of this leader of the opposition when he was the secretary of the AWU, where he presided over deals, where hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid to his union, to the benefit of the union bosses, without telling workers about it,” Dutton said. “At the same time, he was negotiating away the conditions of those workers.”
The minister for defence industry, Christopher Pyne doubled down on that line of attack, accusing Shorten of selling out workers at Cleanevent.
“These are amongst the lowest paid workers in the country doing one of the toughest jobs in the country,” Pyne said.
“These are the people that turn up after an event at the bachelor and spinsters’ ball in South Australia or the race days and clean up the vomit from the portaloos and empty the toilets and take away the empty beer cans and the plastic mugs and try to put the place back into shape again.
“They’re the lowest-paid workers in the community, doing one of the toughest jobs in the community, and this bloke sold them down the river.”
Before entering politics, Turnbull was at the centre of the collapse of the insurance giant HIH – then Australia’s largest corporate collapse – when he was head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Turnbull advised FAI, an insurance company acquired by HIH in 1998.
The corporate transactions were controversial, and sparked a royal commission, but no adverse findings were made against Turnbull.
