Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I did, because he's not the minister who bought the land. It was the minister for communications. The minister for communications was the one who, at the time, held the infrastructure portfolio. They announced as a government that they would pursue value for money. How does value for money work? You take a property that's worth $3 million that you don't own. You go to the owner of the $3 million property and say: 'I'll buy it from you for $30 million, and then you can rent it back from me. But when you rent it back, it won't be worth $30 million. We'll base it on the fact that it's now worth less than $1 million.' So if you're buying it, it's worth 30 times the price; if you're renting it, it's a third of the price.

What was the response from the minister for communications when he was asked about this happening under his watch? He actually stood up at the National Press Club and begged people to believe that he knew nothing about what was going on. Only a very special minister like that bloke wants you to believe he was asleep at the wheel. And tonight, in the biggest spending budget ever, with Australia facing the biggest debt ever, one of the challenges we have is that we know they won't be smart in how they spend the money. It was the perfect question time for the minister for energy to give an answer. It's the first scandal in a while that he hasn't seemed to be part of. We'd better check the electoral map, because, if there's a scandal and the minister for energy is not yet involved, I reckon we haven't all done our homework yet. We'll make a note to self on that.

The Prime Minister, then, in the outrageous claims about houses on fire—I'm not going to take lectures from a Prime Minister who has overseen the state of aged care. Going into this pandemic, we were told right from the start that aged care was going to be one of the most at-risk areas. It was already an area that was seen to be doing poorly enough that we had to have a royal commission, yet we discovered that they didn't even have a plan. We have had the hundreds of deaths in aged care. And, let's not forget, it's not like the government can claim that the royal commissioners were poorly chosen. They chose them, they've looked at this, and they are the ones who are coming back with no plan for aged care.

The bushfire clean-up is probably the most horrific of all the examples. We have a circumstance where they announced a $2 billion bushfire recovery fund. Most of that money is still locked away. They then thought, 'We'd better do something,' so they announced a further $4 billion emergency response fund. Eighteen months later, not one dollar has been spent. In tonight's budget, let's face it, it is important to the nation what they do. But all we will get tonight is what they announce. And, for the last six budgets, we have seen a government that has gotten every number wrong and has failed to deliver what they have announced.

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