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Transcripts
December 6, 2025
LUKE GRANT: Now we have elected representatives, particularly paid for by the people who promise transparency and honesty, and I have to say they are MIA or they are doing the preaching. Tim Ayers and Penny Wong, if they don't get a question they like, boy oh boy, don't they, you know, bang the desk and carry on like it's their show, how dare you. And very often, I don't know if the chair of these committees are pro-government or with the government, probably they are, so you know, there's no Minister answering the question. Seems to be none of that. One of the stars of the Coalition in this space and elsewhere is Senator James Paterson, who's been able to shine the light on a number of big issues. I thought we'd get the Shadow Finance Minister on the line, and he's there right now. G’day James.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you, Luke.
LUKE GRANT: Thanks so much for your time. Look before we get to estimates, can I just get to Labor Minister Anika Wells, who not only spent a hundred grand or thereabouts, I think for her and two others to fly to the UN to say, look at us, we've got someone else's idea about banning social media for young people, which I support, and I've got to tell you about it. She did that in six minutes. Now she has, we're told, made three trips to Europe in the space of a year, slugging taxpayers more than six hundred bucks on a lavish dinner and plaid dessert, lunch during the Paris Olympics. I mean, what a gift this is for you.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: This is a Minister which is just completely out of touch with Australians, and I think honestly, out of touch with reality. I mean, what Minister in their right mind would think on one of their three taxpayer funded trips to Paris that it was a good idea to have a $600 meal in a fancy French restaurant and to charge it to taxpayers? I mean, Ministers are well paid. If you want to have an expensive meal in Paris while you're there on a taxpayer funded trip, then pay for it yourself. Don't charge it to taxpayers. There are Australians who can barely pay their electricity bills, who are on hardship plans because the cost of living is so out of control. And here's a Minister who thinks it's perfectly fine to charge them for the privilege of a fancy meal.
LUKE GRANT: Look, sometimes you turn up in a city and someone you know might be having a celebration, so you might be there for business, and you go and attend a social event. But she's billed taxpayers $3600 for flights, accommodation, and transport for a trip to Adelaide during which she attended a friend's birthday party. Now again, sometimes these things happen, but given her record, one is I think inclined to think there might be something more to this.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I think the problem for Anika Wells is it is not just one thing. It's a pattern of behaviour. It's the $100,000 worth of flights to New York, it's the $600 meal in Paris, and yes, it's the $3600 for a trip to Adelaide that just happened to coincide with a friend's birthday party, all at the taxpayers' expense. I mean, it just shows that she's got no understanding of how hard Australians work for their money, of how much tax they have to pay, and how, as a Minister of the Crown, she should be respectful of those taxpayer dollars and not abuse them for her own personal privileges.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah, questions to answer there. Trouble is the House, well the Parliament is not sitting until next year, but I know you'll revisit all of this. Now let's get to Estimates. Great work again by you, James. You lead the show, I have to say, with all of this. So the Greens need a party room, probably part of a deal they've done with the government to give them support from time to time. A party room would be a big room, I assume. I've never been in one with a number of chairs, maybe a podium and maybe some tables. $1.6 million?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: For your listeners, Luke, this is a pretty simple affair. It's a boardroom, basically, with fifteen chairs around a table. There's not much more to it than that. But you'd have to think that the handles on the doors were gold-plated. Because $1.6 million to renovate a single room in an existing building in Parliament House just beggars belief. And what I can't believe is that the Labor Party, you know, saw the plans, saw the budget, and thought, yep, that seems like value for money. You can build a family home for $400,000. You can build a family home with a garage, a couple of bathrooms, four bedrooms, you know, all the new appliances. None of that is in the case in this building. It's just a room in Parliament House and it costs $1.6 million.
LUKE GRANT: So what happens next? because people hearing you and they're going, Yeah, damn right you can build a home for four hundred or half a million or whatever. So this just goes through to the keeper. I don't know what you can do. I mean you can't disassemble the whole thing, but is someone not held responsible and asked, you know, next time something like this passes your desk, please don't approve it?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: This is one of the most common bits of feedback I receive on social media and from constituents. They say, Good on you for exposing this, but what next? What are the consequences for this? And the truth is the only consequences these people face are electoral consequences. If you think the Labor Party is misspending your money, well, don't vote for them next time. Don't let your friends, don't let your family, don't let your neighbours vote for them next time, because if they get re-elected after wasting your money like this, they'll think there's nothing wrong with it and you'll get a lot more of it.
LUKE GRANT: The Australian Public Service Commissioner acknowledged that public servants routinely provide formal briefs accompanied by real advice on handwritten sticky notes that routinely disappear. Have a listen to this.
[CLIP]
LUKE GRANT: Out of interest, have you seen that yourself?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: No, I've never seen that. And the most extraordinary thing about that evidence is, for your listeners, Dr. Gordon De Brouwer is the head of the Australian Public Service Commission. That is the body which is responsible for setting standards for the public service and enforcing standards. They investigate public servants when they breach the code of conduct. And here was he implying that there was no big deal and it wasn't anything wrong with losing formal records that are made to brief Ministers. Now, only when challenged did he backtrack and realise the implications of what he was saying. But this is what passes for standards in the public service under the Albanese government.
LUKE GRANT: So you have a proposition, you get the public service to provide commentary, and that might be the, you know, predictable, acceptable commentary. And then you might say, Oh, by the way, on a handwritten note, the opposition have no policy on this, so you'll get away with it. I mean, I don't know if it's that brazen, but something like that?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Or it might be, Minister, here's a list of options in the formal brief of the policy that you should enact and here's a sticky note that says don't do options one, two and three, do option four. This is what I really think. Now, there are a lot of reasons why it's important for public servants to keep records. I mean, they are employed by taxpayers, and we have a right to know. But it's also critical if down the track if something goes wrong, that we have a right to know how and where it went wrong, whether the Minister followed advice or not. And so there are very strict laws around this, and for a public service boss to kind of be blase about that is really quite shocking.
LUKE GRANT: Now, the ISIS brides meetings, Tony Burke apparently asked a public official to leave the meeting. This is with a charity. You kind of would only do that, wouldn't you, James, if you wanted to say stuff you didn't want to have recorded? ... Unless you wanted to have something to hide, is that right?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, it's very, very suspicious, Luke, because already what we learnt from this meeting is that the Minister made a number of incriminating offers to this charity. This is a charity that advocates for bringing ISIS members to Australia. The Minister said, thank you for keeping it out of the media. We don't want this to be in the public. The Minister said, if you try to bring these people back, there'll be no blockages to them returning to Australia. He even said once they get here to Australia, we'll provide them with support and assistance. That was all in front of the public servant who took records. And then he said to the public servant, can you leave the meeting so I can have a private conversation with this charity? Now we don't know what was said as part of that secret part of the meeting, but I doubt it was good.
LUKE GRANT: Yes, 100%. You'd have to be, I'm hoping, my listeners are hoping, that you'll pursue Tony Burke on this at some point in the Parliament. You have to, don't you?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: We certainly will, and it's very lucky for Tony Burke that the Parliament doesn't sit until February next year. But of course, as often is the case with Tony Burke, he's gone completely missing in action when there are tough questions to answer. He just goes into hiding, he goes underground, and he hopes things pass, but we're not going to let this pass.
LUKE GRANT: Good on you. What about the transparency report the government had?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: This is a shocker, Luke. So over two years ago, nearly three years ago, the government received a report from a former public servant into how to appoint people to boards because there was a perception that, you know, politicians were appointing their mates to these jobs. Now they sat on this report for two and a half years, they refused to release it, even though the Senate ordered them to release it multiple times, and then finally when they released it to the public, they selectively gave it out to a handful of journalists before they provided it to the Senate so that favourable articles could be written about this before Senators could scrutinise it. Now it just shows how cynical this government is. This is a government that promised to be transparent, this is a government that promised that there would be scrutiny, and there's been nothing but.
LUKE GRANT: Yeah. Now, if politics doesn't work out, Katy Gallagher could be a writer for I don't know, Yes Minister or something like that. She spent some time this week trying to deny the existence of a letter. Have a listen.
[CLIP]
LUKE GRANT: Oh, mate. I don't know how you deal with it, quite frankly.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, honestly, if Rob Sitch, writing the next season of Utopia, produced a script like this, his colleagues would say, No, no, no, no, no, that's not plausible. Surely a Minister wouldn't deny there's a letter if there actually was a letter. But that's exactly what Katy Gallagher did and tried to get away with. And again, it just shows us the contempt that the Albanese government and the Labor Party have for the Australian people. They made so much of how they would be better than the former Morrison government when it came to scrutiny. But there are now independent integrity bodies like the Centre for Public Integrity, which say the Albanese government is the least transparent government we have had in decades.
LUKE GRANT: Wow. Great work as always, Senator James Paterson. If I don't speak to you, all the best for Christmas and for the new year, and I thank you for your time.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thank you, Luke, and to your listeners.
ENDS