Canberra Liberals leader Zed Seselja says he has ''no knowledge'' of his staff distributing material about the sister of Chief Minister Katy Gallagher to the media earlier this year.
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Mr Seselja said yesterday his party's pursuit of Ms Gallagher's sister over the data-doctoring scandal at Canberra Hospital was legitimate but Labor comments about Canberra Liberals’ family members was ''grubby politics.''
As the row over the involvement of politicians families intensified yesterday, Ms Gallagher accused her opponents of double standards and called on Mr Seselja and his colleagues to ''toughen up''.
The Canberra Times reported in July that a Liberals staffer had distributed ACT Health organisational charts, clearly marking Ms Gallagher's sister's role at the hospital, to journalists from this newspaper, WIN TV and the ABC, before a July 17 Assembly committee hearing on the matter.
Labor were unhappy on the day of the hearing, saying the Liberals briefed the media before the event about the Chief Minister's sister's job at the Canberra Hospital and then used parliamentary privilege to question the role of Ms Gallagher's sister, who was cleared of any misconduct in the affair, in the falsification of data. But Mr Seselja said yesterday that family members should not be brought into politics and denied knowing anything about his staffers' conduct on the day of the hearing.
Liberals' health spokesman Jeremy Hanson also told several media outlets that he had no knowledge of the distribution of the document. Mr Seselja was asked at a press conference yesterday who had authorised the distribution of the material about Ms Gallagher's sister.
''I'm not aware of what you're talking about,'' he said
But Mr Seselja refused to answer questions about whether he would investigate the conduct of his staff and instead accused Labor of pursuing a strategy of linking Canberra Liberals' family members to the political conduct of their relatives.
''Clearly there is [a strategy],'' he said. ''Three times in three days is no accident and instead of debating things like non-government schools policy, what they've decided is to simply attack family members with no justification so we can only assume that this is an Anna Bligh-style attack.''
Mr Seselja cut his press conference short yesterday, as did Mr Hanson, who was forced to defend himself over his wife's use of a taxpayer-supplied car. He said he knew nothing about the ''backgrounding'' of the media about Ms Gallagher's sister. ''Well, I've got no idea what you're talking about there, if you've got some allegation then you'll have to express it to me, because I don't know what you're talking about,'' Mr Hanson replied to the question.
''The Assembly says it's perfectly OK, I don't see what the issue is and there seems to be a smokescreen here when The Canberra Times is running a story about me driving my own car.
''The rules are quite clear about what the car can be used for. My wife is quite entitled to use our family car that is part of my salary package, it's within the Legislative Assembly guidelines. If Katy Gallagher sees this as an attack on my family, if that's something that she wants to do, then I'm disappointed.''
But Ms Gallagher said the Liberals were being precious and accused them of double standards on families. ''It is difficult for families,'' she told ABC radio. ''I don't think they should be brought into politics but I find the double standards here absolutely amazing after the attacks that my family have suffered repeatedly over the past six months.''