Abbott offers to pay for marble table

The hearing also heard that DPS staff were refused access to the prime ministerial suite to inspect the broken table until four days after Abbott lost the party room ballot.

Australian Senator Penny Wong during a Senate estimates hearing.

The marble table cost A$590 ($428; £277) when it was purchased more than twenty years ago.

Parliament was told the damage happened during the party honouring Abbott and was spotted the next day in the Cabinet ante room by Parliament House cleaners.

The Senate committee also heard that pieces of the broken table were pocketed by a few of Abbott’s most senior colleagues, and had been spotted in ministerial offices by cleaning staff days after the social gathering.

It’s kind of unusual for ministers to have shards or fragments of marble in their offices, correct?

The committee even argued over whether they should say the table had been “damaged” or “smashed” – with one senator claiming the breakage could have been caused by a “natural fault in the marble”.

Labor senator and trade spokeswoman Penny Wong had questioned DPS staff as to why there was no immediate investigation into the damage of Commonwealth property.

The president of the Senate, Stephen Parry, said: “There’s a serious issue of breach of confidentiality…”

Gossip quickly emerged that the then Treasurer Joe Hockey and then Assistant Infrastructure Minister Jamie Briggs were dancing on such a table and Briggs fell off.

Liberal senator Cory Bernardi said the email’s description of how the table was damaged was “largely speculative”.

“It would have been a basic contractual obligation not to be reporting on what they find in ministerial offices”, Senator Parry said.

Wong: “I will place on record that I think it is an extraordinary thing that a presiding officer is concerned about what the cleaners have done here and not about the fact that Commonwealth property has been treated in this way”.

Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott’s successor, is a relative of 1920s British Labour leader George Lansbury, and a distant cousin of Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury.

On the night he was sacked, Abbott was reported to have had a boozy do in his parliamentary office suite – which reportedly involved him dancing with his shirt off and resulted in the destruction of an Italian marble coffee table.