CORONAVIRUS —
INTERSTATE BORDER RESTRICTIONS — HIGH COURT CHALLENGE
530. Mr D.R. MICHAEL to the Attorney General:
I refer to Prime Minister Scott
Morrison's promise to have the commonwealth withdraw from the High
Court challenge to Western Australia's border and to, instead, offer
support for WA. Can the Attorney General update the house on the status of the
commonwealth's intervention in these proceedings?
Mr J.R.
QUIGLEY replied:
I want to give a bit of background
to the commonwealth's both confused and disgraceful intervention in
these proceedings. Firstly, once Mr Palmer launched the proceedings, the
motivation for which is now laid bare to the chamber—that is, just to
come over the border and plunder Western Australia for $30 billion—the
commonwealth intervened through the Attorney-General. At that time, he said,
publicly, that he was intervening to assist the court with the law. Shortly
before the hearing was to convene on 13 July, our witness, Professor Loguke—the
best epidemiologist in Australia—became unavailable because she had to
go and help in Victoria. We had to make an application to adjourn the hearing
for a fortnight so that the Solicitor-General could confer with that witness.
We wrote to the federal Attorney-General, Mr
Porter, and his response was that the commonwealth would take a neutral
position on the adjournment application by WA. When we went to court the next
morning, Mr Porter went the other way, supported Clive Palmer and opposed the
adjournment so that we could not get to speak to the professor who was going to
support Western Australia. Fortunately, the judge overruled both Mr Palmer and
Mr Porter and gave us the two-week adjournment.
The SPEAKER: Attorney General,
your phone is on the table and once the information gets tabled, you will lose
your phone for the rest of the day.
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: I will bear
that in mind.
It is important I get the truth out
there. Mr Porter was then still maintaining that he was only intervening on
behalf of the commonwealth to assist the court. In the hearing, he put in a 25-page
attack on Western Australia's defence of Clive Palmer's action
and I table that in the chamber today.
[See paper 3557.]
Mr J.R. QUIGLEY: It is a 25-page
attack by the Attorney-General of the commonwealth upon Western Australia. No wonder his own constituents on Facebook went
off and started calling him the Benedict Arnold of Western Australia. On
the Saturday, I published a notice of intervention that clearly stated that the
Attorney-General intervened in support of
the plaintiffs, which are Clive Palmer and Mineralogy, so he was in there, full
force, supporting Clive Palmer and
Mineralogy on what the Premier has described as what appears to be a payoff by
the Liberal Party to Clive Palmer for the $60 million or $80 million
payoff—that is one alternative; I will give members the other one—during
the last federal election campaign. Mr Porter must be asked questions. If he
does not know what Clive Palmer's true motivations were, which were
nothing to do with the border, Clive Palmer has played him for a dope and
sucked him into some High Court proceedings to support Clive Palmer coming
across the border to plunder Mr Porter's home state of Western Australia
of $30 billion.
But
there is a way for Christian Porter to redeem himself, and it is the only way
to redeem himself at this stage of the High Court proceedings, and that is to
file a notice of intervention in support of Western Australia, to maintain the
hard border, to stop Clive Palmer coming back across the border to plunder the
state of Western Australia for funds. I implore and make an open request in
this Parliament. Where Christian Porter sits as an Attorney General to
forthwith file a notice of
intervention that would state, ''The Attorney General intervenes in
support of the first and second defendants,'' that is the state of Western
Australia and our State Emergency Coordinator, Mr Christopher John Dawson.
That is the state of proceedings and
we are waiting for the federal court to make its ruling on the High Court's
remittance. It is not too late. The Federal
Court expects to deliver its decision on 24 August. There is now ample time
for Christian Porter, the federal Attorney-General, to file a notice of
intervention in support of Western Australia and its hard border. May it please
you, Mr Speaker.