The attorney general, George Brandis, said the solicitor general was involved “from time to time” in the internal consultations over the federal government’s controversial citizenship laws, largely because of rolling internal political contention within the government at that time.
Brandis gave an unusually frank account of the internal rancour generated by the citizenship revocation proposal pursued by Tony Abbott before he lost the Liberal party leadership in an effort to contextualise why the solicitor-general, Justin Gleeson, was consulted irregularly on the citizenship laws.
“As you will recall, this was an issue of very significant political controversy in the late days of the Abbott government,” Brandis told the ABC on Thursday.
“It was an issue on which, to be blunt, the cabinet was divided between on the one hand, me, Mr Turnbull and Julie Bishop and others, and on the other hand, the then prime minister Mr Abbott, and Mr Dutton, who was then the responsible minister, as to how extensive the power of executive detention should be.
“There were many, many chapters to this political controversy, during the course of which Mr Gleeson was involved from time to time.”
Brandis contended the breadth of consultations with Gleeson as the government’s internal dispute unfolded were sufficient to validate a claim he made to the Labor party that Gleeson had advised the package had a good prospect of clearing the high court.
Gleeson contested this in an extraordinary submission to a Senate inquiry.
He said he gave advice on the first drafts of the citizenship bill in 2014 but was not consulted on the version later introduced to parliament.
Gleeson insisted the government did not seek his counsel in an orderly way on sensitive legal proposals, including whether its contentious policy to revoke citizenship for dual nationals was constitutional – which was a major concern about the package – and the legal mechanisms proposed to pursue marriage equality.
The complaint is part of a simmering disagreement between Australia’s first and second law officers that has been playing out behind the scenes for months.
The argument entered the public domain on Wednesday, when Gleeson indicated via his submission to a Senate inquiry that the government had consulted him only intermittently on contentious legal questions, and Brandis had not consulted him before issuing a government-wide directive that all requests for legal advice come through him.
Brandis told parliament earlier this year he had consulted the solicitor general about the new directive, an account emphatically rejected by Gleeson.
Gleeson’s detailed account of events has prompted Labor to call for the attorney to resign.
“He’s lied to the Senate, he’s lied to the Australian people,” said the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, on Thursday.
“It’s a disgraceful act by the attorney general and he should be resigning.
“If he doesn’t resign then Mr Turnbull, who is after all … was once a lawyer, should sack him.”
Brandis has batted off calls for his resignation. He has used a not-yet-published submission to the Senate inquiry to argue he did consult Gleeson, and he used radio and television interviews on Thursday morning to insist he had not misled the parliament.
Brandis said his account of their conversation could be backed up by two contemporaneous note makers and “those notes show without doubt” Gleeson was consulted about the directive. The meeting notes have been given to the Senate inquiry as part of the Brandis submission.
“I have not misled the parliament,” Brandis told ABC Radio National. “There were consultations.
“What this was about what regularising an administrative practice.”
Brandis conceded Gleeson had proposed a method where legal briefs would come to him and he would inform Brandis of the request – instead of the system Brandis ultimately mandated, which was the attorney general was the first port of call.
Despite the obvious difference between those two propositions, Brandis claimed there was no “significant difference” between the proposals.
He insisted their relationship remained functional. He said he had never had “a cross word” with Gleeson, and could continue to work with him, despite their relationship deteriorating into a public slanging match.
