Senator REYNOLDS (Western Australia) (21:49): I rise tonight to speak of one of the more shameful red herrings deployed recently by the ALP. This is Labor’s referral to the Auditor-General of supposed donations by Parakeelia to the Liberal Party. It should have been obvious to everybody, particularly to some of the breathlessly credulous commentators on this issue at the time, that the amounts in question were in fact not donations but other receipts—a fundamentally important distinction. So surprise, surprise: today the Audit Office said a preliminary investigation has confirmed that the referred arrangements are completely above board—hardly a surprise. The Audit Office found absolutely no evidence that Parakeelia donated any profits from the sale of Feedback software to the Liberal Party. In fact, the Audit Office found absolutely the opposite. The Audit Office found that the financial transactions reported to the AEC between Parakeelia and the Liberal Party indicated a net cost to the Liberal Party from the years 2000 to 2015. So not only was no money directly going from Parakeelia to the Liberal Party in net terms; the Liberal Party was actually subsidising the cost of it to Liberal Party members.

So, rather than profiting from Feedback, the Liberal Party has been subsidising it. This very arrangement that Mr Shorten called a scam was actually no scam at all, and in fact it is so typical of the hypocrisy of the Labor Party. The same charge—equally, I must note, without foundation—could have been made about Labor’s arrangement whereby money has gone directly from the taxpayer to the Labor Party and, before then, going to Labor’s software provider, Magenta Linas. Mr Shorten talked of a scam that the Audit Office has dismissed.

But I now turn to something for which there is evidence in my home state of Western Australia, namely an apparent so called round-robin scam which appear to channel money from Perth Trades Hall to the Labor Party and then from the Western Australian taxpayer to Magenta Linas and then back to Trades Hall. As I said, an apparent round-robin, using Mr Shorten’s words, looks like a scam to me. After his comments on Parakeelia, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, not unreasonably was asked if he could rule out Magenta Linas ever having donated to the Labor Party or any of its subsidiaries.

In answer to this question, Mr Shorten said in part:

The Labor party has no ownership structures at all of Magenta Linas. I don’t know every transaction they’ve had at the state level but what I do know is that the clear difference here is that the Liberal Party—they love a dollar these Liberals.

Let us look at just who really loves the dollars. It is very interesting that Mr Shorten professed ignorance of transactions at a state level, because an examination of electoral returns showed that in 2000-01 Perth Trades Hall made a donation of $431,089 to Labor, and that over five years until 2004-05 Magenta Linas returned a total of $284,978 to Trades Hall. This $284,978 was paid by Magenta Linas to Perth Trades Hall in the form of two unspecified prima facie ‘donations’, two ‘payments’ and one ‘other receipt’.

The interesting thing is that in October 2000 Magenta Linas, following a tender process, was conditionally accepted to supply, install and support the Electrac electorate information management system for WA ALP members. In 2006, then WA opposition leader in the Legislative Council complained in parliament that the cost to the WA state government of supplying Electrac to Labor members using Magenta Linas was double that of supplying opposition members with an electorate information management system called EMS, after the state Labor government had excluded Parakeelia from the initial tender process.

The WA government awarded and paid Magenta Linas $157,000 per annum for Electrac, which was for the exclusive use of ALP members, but only $80,000 for non-government members to use Consultech’s EMS software. I can assure members of the Senate that there were not twice as many ALP members. Were ALP members getting twice the value for their electoral database system? I suspect they were not. In a motion on this matter, the then opposition leader in the Legislative Council, the Hon. Norman Moore, moved on 2 November 2006 the following motion on electoral database systems:

That this house expresses its serious concern at the government’s decision to provide a different and more expensive electorate information management system to each Australian Labor Party state member of Parliament than that provided to all non-ALP members.

He also noted:

In Western Australia, the government provides more money to Labor members of Parliament for their electorate information management system than it provides to non-Labor members. That, to me, is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, in the absence of any explanation to the contrary.

Guess what? He never got an answer to that contradiction of why the Labor system was so much more expensive than that provided to non-Labor members.

What makes these particular transactions between Trades Hall, the ALP and Magenta Linas even more concerning is the very close links between WA Labor and the Perth Trades Hall at the time. Bill Johnston was the State Secretary of the ALP in WA from April 2001 until his election to state parliament in September 2008. He was also State Secretary of Perth Trades Hall. As such, he is the person who submitted the return detailing the Perth Trades Hall’s donation of $431,089 made on the 17 October 2000, as well as the person who disclosed the same amount as having been received by the ALP in its 2000-01 return to the AEC. He was also the person who on five separate occasions disclosed the receipt by Perth Trades Hall of a total of $284,978 from Magenta Linas, the provider of the ALP’s electoral management system.

In light of the above and Mr Shorten’s statement that he knew nothing about any state payments, I now call on Mr Shorten to detail all he knows about these transactions at a WA state level. He and the WA Leader of the Opposition, Mark McGowan, must advise the Western Australian taxpayers what the federal and state Labor leaders knew about the transactions between Magenta Linas, Perth Trades Hall and the WA Labor Party. The $431,089 donation from Perth Trades Hall was made about four months before the 2001 state election and would have been of obvious benefit to the state ALP. As we again approach a state election in Western Australia in little over six months, I would hope commentators treat Mr Shorten’s statements, such as those he made about Parakeelia, with the scepticism they deserve. Next time he deploys similar red herrings, his claims will be more closely scrutinised.

In conclusion, the Audit Office did not find a shred of evidence that Parakeelia donated any profits from the sale of Feedback software to the Liberal Party. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The Audit Office actually found that the Liberal Party subsidised the provision of this database. The Labor Party in Western Australia now clearly have questions to answer on these matters.