Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Two years and one week ago, in my first speech, I committed to do what my community asked me to: to work to recover the public's faith in our democratic system and to harness politics to enlarge opportunities and our national imagination. Of course, since that time our country has been challenged by forces of nature, by bushfires and by disease. These challenges have demanded responses by governments, federal and state, that will leave a lasting impact on our capacity to enlarge opportunities and our national imagination.

What I want to speak about today is a challenge that is posed to our politic itself by the conduct of the Morrison government and to warn that if we do not take a stand it will be irrevocably changed so the ambitions, such as recovering public faith in our system, will be nothing more than quixotic words. Today the Centre for Public Integrity released research that found that 100 per cent of the Morrison government's grant programs that have been audited by the ANAO since 2019 were flawed. Remember the Regional Jobs and Investment Packages where applications were not soundly assessed; the award of over $400 million to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, with insufficient scrutiny; sports rorts; the Supporting Reliable Energy Infrastructure Program and most recently, and arguably most audaciously, the Commuter Car Park Projects, where not everyone could even apply and it was based on winning seats? It is time, as Supreme Court judge—(Time expired)

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