Parliament House

SUBJECTS: Response to the Prime Minister’s contradictory statements on Bob Carr

E&OE…………

Christopher Pyne: There’s two points that I’d like to make.  Firstly, that the Prime Minister contradicted herself in Question Time today.  Yesterday she said the story The Australian wrote about the foreign ministry issue involving Bob Carr was ‘completely untrue’ and today in Question Time in response to a question from the Opposition she said that she had spoken to Bob Carr on Monday and of course they had talked about adding him to the team.  That is a very different statement to the statement she made yesterday when she utterly dismissed the possibility that that could be true. 

Secondly she was asked today to reaffirm the statement made outside the House that this story was ‘completely untrue’ and her answer was tricky and evasive.  She left out the word ‘completely’ and she simply said that it was untrue.  In other words she refused to simply restate the statement she made outside the House.  We know that is because she would have been misleading the House if she had done so.  So she deliberately parsed the sentence to avoid misleading Parliament which is a sackable offence. 

The only conclusion that people can draw from this contradiction and the failure of the Prime Minister to back up her statements yesterday is the Prime Minister is not telling the truth and when the Prime Minister is not telling the truth about a matter as important as this one then they are no longer fit to be Prime Minister. 

ENDS