I June 1997
E&OE...............................................
Journalist:
The ALP's legal advice, is it some sort of backflip this week? Is that what we've been witnessing?
Prime Minister:
Well, what we've released this afternoon is the former Labor Government's submission to the High Court in the Kruger case. And in that submission, the former Government argued trenchantly against compensation and advanced many of the arguments that I have used myself in the past few days. The bottom line is that Kim Beazley is saying in Opposition something completely inconsistent with what he said in Government. The facts are the same. This was an actual case involving children in the Northern Territory. His Government argued against compensation and argued all sorts of things completely opposite of what he's now arguing, and people can make their own judgement.
We are releasing the submission this afternoon and it certainly illustrates the huge backflip by Mr Beazley, another inconsistency between what he said in Government and what he's now saying in Opposition. I mean, you've got to be consistent in these things. If you say compensation is not justified in Government, you can't then say it's justified in Opposition. Yet, that is exactly what he's done.
Thank you.