Transcript - Doorstop Interview - Parliament House

SUBJECTS: Clive Palmer; WA Border Court Case; Demotion of Aged Care Minister.
 
PATRICK GORMAN, MEMBER FOR PERTH: Today we see that the Prime Minister is going to slightly, kind of, sort of, bench his Aged Care Minister after weeks and weeks of fumbling. That's too little, too late for hundreds of families across Australia and the Prime Minister's still failing to actually take ownership of this crisis. So, we've got a Prime Minister refusing to actually remove his Aged Care Minister, refusing to do anything about Michael Sukkar; the Coalition solution is to remove Michael McCormack. Of all the people you'd be looking to remove today, Michael McCormack should not be at the top of the list, don't know why I'm defending him, but he shouldn't be at the top of the list today.
 
The other challenge that we have today is of course, the Federal Court is handing down its decision on Clive Palmer's attempt to tear down the Western Australian border. Clive Palmer, Christian Porter and the Prime Minister all teamed up together in this High Court challenge to tear down the WA border, destroy WA livelihoods, put the health of Western Australians at risk and put at risk our mining sector which has done so much to protect the economy during this pandemic.
 
Yes, eventually the Prime Minister decided that he would kind of change his mind about his support for Clive Palmer, after they'd given evidence. After they'd helped him in the Federal Court and the decision that is made today is a decision made with the full support of Scott Morrison for Clive Palmer's case.
 
JOURNALIST: Christian Porter says that your description of that is not correct and that the government always helps out with these by giving basically jurisprudence assistance to the court. What is your response to that?
 
GORMAN: This is a global pandemic. This is unprecedented. And for Christian Porter to rely on legal precedents about some pretty benign other cases they've been involved in I think is very disappointing. When it comes to helping Clive Palmer, Clive Palmer is a lawsuit-a-minute kind of guy. He's always got cases running in the High Court, the Federal Court etc. I don't know that Christian Porter has got the resources to keep up with all of Clive Palmer's court cases. And they ultimately did change their mind, even after Christian Porter had made all of those arguments, hours later the Prime Minister then went and said "oh no, we're going to pull you out of this case".So it's highly embarrassing for Mr Porter and proved that the argument was in fact false.
 
JOURNALIST: The text of the Constitution seems to be pretty emphatic in this area. Are you concerned that the the border closure is going to be overturned in the court?
 
GORMAN: I'm concerned that would be incredibly bad for the health West Australians. It would be incredibly bad in terms of our national capacity to contain this virus, and I'm concerned about what it would do to our economy. The fact is Western Australia's mining industry and other parts of our industry have been able to go very strongly because of these hardline border restrictions. They're Supported by the people of Australia, they're supported by the people of Western Australia. I hope the Federal Court allows Western Australia to continue in the way that we've been able to manage this virus.
 
JOURNALIST: Getting away from his faux pas at the Committee. What are Richard Colbeck's, in your view, failings in the aged care sector? What's he failed at?
 
GORMAN: I think we're seeing in the Royal Commission and in our communities day on day, a lack of aged care beds, we are seeing a lack of direction for the aged care sector. He is unable to stay on top of very basic figures. And frankly, I think aged care is one of the most important things, how we look after our most precious people in the last years of their life, and to have someone who is not the top performing Minister in the Morrison Government, I don't think it is good enough.
 
Thank you very much.