Lenore Taylor, political editor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 27 May 2014
After hours of debate, opposition's Tony Burke refuses to apologise and Speaker takes the matter no further
Bronwyn Bishop, under fire from Labor. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
The government on Tuesday accused Labor of “bullying” the Speaker, Bronwyn Bishop, and used its numbers to try to force the leader of opposition business, Tony Burke, to apologise for asserting Bishop improperly used her private dining room for a Liberal party fundraiser.
But when the motion demanding an apology was finally passed after hours of debate and procedural wrangling, Burke refused to apologise and Bishop did not seek to force the issue further, saying only that she hoped the “salutary motion” brought more “decorum” to the house.
Burke alleged on Monday that the Speaker’s fundraiser on budget night in her private dining room showed she had “outsourced her office to the Liberal party as a fundraising venue”.
Citing a newspaper article from 2000 in which it was reported that seven years earlier the former Labor speaker Leo McLeay had also used the Speaker’s dining room for a fundraiser, Pyne said Labor had been wrong to claim the practice was without precedent and Bishop had been right to assert that MPs could use their suites for anything they wished, provided it was legal.
He advised Labor “to understand they can’t keep trying to belt the umpire, they have to accept the fact that the opposition is in power … and that when you are in the chair you are exercising the impartiality that any Speaker should”.
Pyne said Burke had reflected on the Speaker and that this was “one of the worst crimes a member can do in this place”. He called on Burke to apologise “to restore integrity to the role of Speaker”.
“If the opposition is allowed to continue to denigrate and bully the Speaker then they denigrate the entire house,” Pyne insisted.
Burke apologised for “getting the one detail wrong” about the fundraiser being entirely unprecedented, but said he would not apologise for saying the Speaker was biased because she clearly was.
“If members of the Liberal party think they can use their numbers to silence a member of the Labor party, then bring it on,” he said.
On Monday, Burke unsuccessfully sought to refer the matter to the privileges committee, claiming Bishop’s office had been “outsourced to the Liberal party as a fundraising venue”.
He told her: “Your job is not owned by the Liberal party in a way you can dish out a venue for which, anywhere else in Parliament House, the Liberal party would have to pay $600.”
Burke said the fundraiser was an “appalling precedent” and came when Bishop was already “under pressure” as “the most biased Speaker we’ve ever had”.
Pyne cited an article by the journalist Brian Toohey on 9 August 2000 that said McLeay had a fundraising lunch in the official dining room with eight business executives, and that then prime minister Paul Keating had briefly “dropped in”, just as Tony Abbott had to Bishop’s fundraising dinner on budget night.
The article cited by Pyne also quoted the then Speaker, the Liberal Neil Andrew, as saying he had never used his official rooms for fundraising lunches or dinners.
Earlier in the day, Bishop ejected a Coalition MP –the Queensland Liberal Ewen Jones – from the chamber for the first time. She has ejected Labor MPs on 101 occasions.
