Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly will continue to be relevant, as I have been up until now, to a bill which has within it this term 'payment integrity' when all it is actually about is ripping money off pensioners.

This government lacks integrity. I can say to this House that one can understand why the Prime Minister might be reluctant to sack the member for Hume. If the Prime Minister started sacking ministers who lack integrity, there'd hardly be anyone left! Would he have to sack Senator Cash, for example, for her refusal to cooperate with an Australian Federal Police investigation into the leaking of sensitive information about police operations—leaks that came from her own office? Would he have to sack Senator Cormann for his lack of integrity in accepting free overseas holidays from Liberal Party donors and failing to declare them, linked to the whole shady Helloworld travel scandal involving former Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey? And what would have to be done about the integrity—or lack of it—of the Minister for Home Affairs in this government, a minister who's so incompetent and so negligent in his duties that he had, in his words, 'no sight' of the payment of $423 million by his own department to a company called Paladin that was based in an empty beach shack on Kangaroo Island, all without an open tender or other transparent process? Why didn't that Minister for Home Affairs—or indeed the Prime Minister, who presides over this sorry mess—show any interest in protecting the integrity of that payment of government money?

Or what about the integrity of another payment of government money that the same Minister for Home Affairs mysteriously awarded in the form of a $591 million contract to a private Brisbane based family company to run garrison and welfare services on Nauru without an open tender or a transparent process?

See this speech in context