Cash refuses to resign
Coalition rallies around embattled minister
CABINET minister Michaelia Cash says she hasn’t considered resigning after admitting to giving wrong evidence to a Senate committee.
But she refused to say whether quitting had been canvassed in a meeting with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday morning.
“I will not be going into the ins and outs of the discussions I had with the prime minister,” she told an estimates hearing in Canberra.
Under renewed grilling from Labor senators, the employment minister denied her former senior media adviser had taken a “bullet” for her by resigning after he admitted to informing journalists about federal police raids on union offices.
The Government is blaming a “serious lapse of judgment” by the adviser in tipping off the media about raids on the Sydney and Melbourne offices of the Australian Workers’ Union on Tuesday.
Labor says Senator Cash’s later explanation, in which she continued to deny prior know- ledge of the raids, is unconvincing.
“It defies belief your staff can watch you mislead the Senate five times,” Opposition frontbencher Tony Burke told Sky News.
“If the best she’s got is total incompetence she has to go.”
The Government sent out senior ministers Christopher Pyne, Christian Porter and Mathias Cormann to defend their Cabinet colleague.
“We are not going to be lectured by the Labor Party about the Westminster system of government,” Mr Pyne said.
“The reality is Michaelia Cash told the Senate the truth and as soon as she found out she’d been misled, she corrected the record.”
Senator Cormann insisted Senator Cash had acted appropriately. “As soon as her information and her knowledge changed, she disclosed it at the earliest opportunity,” he told Sky News.
Crossbench Senator Nick Xenophon is prepared to take Senator Cash at her word.
“In my dealings with Senator Cash she’s always been pretty straight up and down with me,” he told ABC radio.
But he said an independent inquiry was needed to determine how information about the raids was leaked.
The Australian Federal Police raided the AWU offices after the Registered Organisations Commission gained a warrant from a magistrate, amid concerns documents could be destroyed. Following a referral by Senator Cash, the commission has been investigating the legitimacy of the AWU’s $100,000 donation to activist group GetUp! in 2005 when Labor leader Bill Shorten ran the union.