Jacqui Lambie has alleged that Scott Morrison told her she risked jail time if she disclosed details of a secret deal that required the government to allow refugees to resettle in New Zealand in exchange for her support to repeal Australia’s “medevac” laws.
The Tasmanian independent senator made the accusations about the “quite threatening” exchange in an interview with news.com.au, published hours after the Morrison government announced it would finally take up New Zealand’s long-standing offer to resettle 150 refugees a year. She said she was “rapt these people are free”.
A law making it easier for refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island to be transferred to Australia for medical treatment was passed against the government’s will in the last sitting week of 2018.
But this medevac legislation was scrapped in 2019 after Lambie joined One Nation senators and sided with the government in the upper house to have it repealed.
Thursday’s news.com.au report indicated the agreement with Lambie included a private commitment from the prime minister to accept the New Zealand resettlement offer, which was first made in 2013.
Lambie said there “certainly” was a written agreement and it was kept in the prime minister’s “secret safe”.
“That was because he wouldn’t give it to me, so I couldn’t present anything if I came out and spoke about it – which I couldn’t anyway, because, basically, if I’d spoken about it nobody was getting off the islands,” she told news.com.au.
In audio of the interview also posted online, the journalist, Samantha Maiden, asked Lambie whether she was threatened with any consequences if she spoke out about the deal.
Lambie said: “Yeah … well if I had just come out and spoken about it, I may have ended up in jail, basically.”
Pressed on who had told her that, Lambie said: “That was made to me over the table from the PM.”
Maiden asked: “So you’re saying that the prime minister told you that you would be – you would risk jail if you told the truth?”
Lambie replied: “That’s correct.” The independent senator added: “I felt really annoyed about that. I found that quite threatening.”
Lambie said Morrison should now release the document about the deal and “produce it without any redactions out of it”.
Lambie was unavailable for a further interview on Thursday evening, but later tweeted that she “didn’t care about the prison threat” but “I was told talking about the deal would kill the deal”.
I was told that talking about the deal would kill the deal.
— Jacqui Lambie (@JacquiLambie) March 24, 2022
If I talked, they would suffer. I just couldn’t do it to them. https://t.co/HsQQedRCxB
The prime minister’s office refused to comment on Lambie’s claims on Thursday, but government sources said it was not correct that she had been threatened with jail and dismissed suggestions an agreement was kept in a safe in Parliament House.
However, they noted that it was standard practice that people who attended high-level security briefings were reminded of the confidentiality provisions relating to such discussions.
Lambie’s revelation of what she claimed was a key element of the “secret deal” struck over the medevac legislation was floated at the time of negotiations between her and Morrison in 2019.
At the time, a tearful Lambie said she had made the “really hard decision” to support the legislation’s repeal because the government had agreed to an “outcome” that would improve the treatment of refugees in Australia’s care.
“I can’t let the boats start back up and I can’t let refugees die, whether it’s sinking into the ocean or waiting for a doctor, and I am voting to make sure that neither of these things happen,” Lambie said then.
“We’ve worked to an outcome I believe we both want, which is an outcome that our borders are secure, the boats have stopped and sick people aren’t dying waiting for treatment. And as a result of that work … I am more than satisfied that the conditions are now in place to allow medevac to be repealed.”
She said she was not being “coy or silly” by not revealing details of the proposal, saying it was a national security concern. A story published in the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that Lambie had demanded the government accept the New Zealand government’s offer – speculation Lambie never denied.
“I know that’s frustrating to people, and I get that. I don’t like holding things back like this. But when I say I can’t discuss it publicly due to national security concerns, I am being 100% honest to you.”
At the time, government sources insisted no deal had been done, saying Lambie had been given thorough, classified briefings about the government’s current approach to resettlement and it was on this basis that she had agreed to repeal the law.
The then government leader in the Senate, Mathias Cormann, said in 2019: “The Labor party thinks that anything, whenever we are able to persuade anyone, the Labor party just assumes there must be some secret deal – there is no secret deal.”
The Australian and New Zealand governments announced on Thursday that up to 450 refugees would be resettled over the next three years, prompting widespread criticism of the Coalition for failing to take up the option sooner.
The home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, defended the delay by saying the government had previously prioritised the resettlement deal with the US. That deal was now “drawing to a conclusion” with only “a couple of hundred” places left.