Australian senator muzzled on new Crown cheating allegations
News on 25 Oct 2017
News on 25 Oct 2017
Whistleblower accusations that Australian gambling group Crown Resorts tampered with its pokie machines and contravened other critical regulations (see previous reports) were compounded Tuesday when independent Senator Andrew Wilkie attempted to table further allegations from a fourth whistleblower, but was prevented from doing so.
Despite Wilkie’s rather melodramatic claims that the fourth whistleblower feared for his life, Government Minister Chris Pyne ruled against the tabling, observing that the convention of parliamentary privilege was never designed to permit politicians to expand on “slanderous or defamatory” allegations.
Pyne was backed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who observed that the Australian federal police, the financial regulator Austrac, and the Victorian provincial regulator are already conducting inquiries into the allegations, and that a parliamentary inquiry called for by Wilkie is unnecessary.
Crown Resorts has vehemently denied the whistleblower accusations Wilkie has championed in parliament, challenging the Senator to step outside privilege in parliament and substantiate the allegations.
Thwarted by his political peers, Wilkie later told media reporters that he would add the fourth whistleblower’s evidence to that submitted to the Victoria police, citing an apparent lack of interest in the issue in parliament, and suggesting that this may be due to the main political parties uniting to support the gambling industry.
However, in an interesting new wrinkle to the growing political acrimony around the allegations it has emerged that the Electrical Trades Union has confronted Crown Resorts over a decision to outsource its pokie maintenance contract.This allegedly led to the retrenchment of 16 of its union members.
Questioned whether any of his four whistleblowers were among those who had been made redundant, Christie refused to answer, saying that he would not give any information that may help identify the anonymous whistleblowers.
