Workplace relations and public service minister Tony Abbott said yesterday he would not reveal the donors to his ‘honest politics’ trust because “there are some things the public has no particular right to know’.

His latest refusal to reveal his donors comes after the Chairman of the Australian Electoral Commission, Justice Trevor Morling, took control of the AEC’s investigations of Mr Abbott’s honest politics slush fund and the AEC commissioned new legal advice on whether to demand disclosure.

Justice Morling criticised aspects of the AEC’s handling of the matter to date, and it is now possible that the AEC will order Mr Abbott to give sworn evidence on the trust.

Asked what things the public had no right to know about, Mr Abbott said: “Where do you start?”

“I don’t propose to nominate a list, I don’t propose to enumerate them. Short of the AEC changing its mind, they are not entitled to know who those donors were unless the donors choose to volunteer that information.”

Mr Abbott also refused to reveal the name of the lawyer he advised the AEC in 1998 had told him no disclosure of donations was required . Asked why, he said: “I just believe private conversations should be private.” Mr Abbott would not comment on why he had detailed this private conversation to the AEC in a letter seeking exemption from disclosing his donors, and this week released the letter to the Australian Financial Review.

The letter also revealed that the honest politics trust, formed in 1998, was not designed only to legally attack One Nation, but also other parties Mr Abbott and the other other trustees saw as a threat. “The object of the Trust is to support legal actions to test the extent to which political entities comply with Australian law,” Mr Abbott told the AEC in 1998.

In 1998 the AEC asked for donor disclosure, but backed down after Mr Abbott told it: “I spoke with one of Australia’s leading electoral lawyers who assured me that the Trust would not be covered by disclosure provisions”. The AEC admitted this week it had taken Mr Abbott’s word for it, and neither asked to see his legal advice or taken its own before backing down.

Mr Abbott conceded to the Herald last night that he had no written legal advice to back his claim that donors should be kept secret from the public, and refused to say whether the lawyer he consulted had seen the Honest Politics Trust document before given his legal opinion.