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

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the Prime Minister and Treasurer started crab walking away from their claim to have already delivered a surplus next year, the 'Back in black' mugs being sold by the Liberal Party for $35 were suddenly listed as 'sold out'. Instead of selling their massively overpriced mugs, the Liberals were revealed to have taken the Australian people for mugs. Suddenly their months of arrogant boasts about having returned the budget to surplus, even while it was still in deficit, were shown to be a self-serving campaign of garbage. They're a bit like the dodgy builder who tells you: 'The job's all finished. How great am I? Now pay me.' And then you discover that the job isn't finished at all, and the builder says: 'Well, when I said it was finished, what I meant was that I thought I was going to finish it, but it turned out to be harder than I thought. And how could I know it would rain? Anyway, look over there!'

For any other government, this would have been considered a catastrophic failure on the core promise that they were elected to deliver on. For the Morrison government, this was just Tuesday's scandal of the day, and it wasn't even the biggest scandal of the week. Yesterday we learned that, contrary to the Prime Minister's claims that he had no involvement in the sports rorts scandal, key people in his office had sent 136 emails to the former minister for sport. People in my electorate of Isaacs can only look on in wonder at a Prime Minister who has nothing to say about falling wages, is doing nothing about falling living standards, seems to welcome climate change as a great opportunity for a scare campaign and thought nothing of sneaking out of the country during the bushfire crisis but still had time to intervene 136 times on how best to rort the sports grants scheme to funnel taxpayers' money into the Liberals' re-election campaign.

The people in my electorate of Isaacs in the south-east of Melbourne who volunteer and participate at sporting clubs in places like Mordialloc, Dandenong and Parkdale never had a chance to get a grant under the Liberal Party's corrupt scheme. Why? Because my seat was not a target seat. My electorate office staff are now fielding upwards of 80 to 100 calls each week from people across my electorate and from around the country absolutely sickened by the corrupt behaviour of the Morrison government, failed leadership and deceitful abuse of taxpayers' money through this scandalous sports rorts scheme, a rorting scheme that was entirely conceived and executed for the Prime Minister's own political gain. One community organisation in my electorate, like many others around the country, was knocked back under Mr Morrison scandalous sports rorts pyramid scheme. No reason was given. All it received was a sanitised and generic rejection letter. This government is a disgrace.

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