Opposition MPs buying coal mine shares

Updated: 17:04, Thursday June 14, 2012

Australians have a right to know MPs are buying shares in coal mines while warning the carbon tax will kill the industry, the prime minister says.

Instead she said Australians had a right to know which coalition members were buying shares in coal companies while the opposition was warning the carbon tax would kill the industry.

The ABC on Thursday quoted a Labor source as saying ministerial staff had been instructed to dig up dirt on political opponents by combing the internet, past speeches and references to their younger days.

Ms Gillard sought to link the report to the opposition’s scare campaign on the carbon tax.

‘The opposition has been running around saying the world’s going to end on the first of July,’ she told ABC Radio, adding Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had said it would be the end of the coal industry.

‘Yet opposition members have been buying shares in coal mining companies.’

People were entitled to know what opposition MPs invested in so they could weigh the worth of ‘those doom and gloom claims’, she said.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the federal government was ‘ethically challenged’ and the prime minister was playing hard and aggressive politics.

‘It’s typical of this government that a dirt unit is operating not in the bowels of the Labor Party headquarters but in the office of the prime minister herself,’ he told reporters in Adelaide.

Mr Abbott denied a similar dirt unit operated within the coalition.