Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The summer break is a time for reflection and renewal, no doubt, but I don't think the Leader of the Opposition has turned into an anticorruption warrior over the break. This is Sam Dastyari's great defender. It took weeks and weeks and weeks of public pressure and outrage before, finally, he had to cut Senator Dastyari loose and lead him out into the wide blue yonder. He's now, of course, standing up for the integrity of the parliament—he really is! He is standing up for the right of UK citizens to sit in the House of Representatives. That seems to be his current passion. At least David Feeney finally did the right thing and resigned. Of course, it took him a long time. The member for Bennelong did the right thing. He stood up; he resigned and he went to a by-election; and he's back. We welcome him back. It took months and months to get the then member for Batman to resign, and the member for Longman is still hanging in there. It may well be that in the Leader of the Opposition's mind there will always be an England, but there will always be a section 44 as well.

In terms of corruption, more generally, he has blocked integrity measures at every turn—at every single turn. He fought tooth and nail to oppose the reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission—an agency whose job it is to restore the rule of law to the construction sector and stop the CFMEU and other unions, including his own, from continuously flouting the law, standing over builders, standing over developers, standing over tradesmen, standing over the Australian construction industry in a way that has been a disgrace for years. But, of course, they're his biggest political donor, so he has to follow them. And of course he opposed the Registered Organisations Commission, which, again, is doing no more than to ensure that there can't be secret payments from employers to unions. Mr Speaker, you would think—and most people would have assumed—that those measures, which we finally got through the parliament, had always been the law. How could it be legal to pay a secret corrupt payment to a union? Well, it was; it's been rectified, and the Leader of the Opposition wanted to keep it. So we won't be taking lectures on corruption or integrity from this serial offender. (Time expired)

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