Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw the reference to fraud. I'm simply making the point that the Prime Minister has tripled the debt. They have fiddled the books; they have driven wages backwards; they have driven jobseekers and small businesses to despair; they have written checks to the value of $20 billion to boost the bonuses and dividends of their mates. It's all on the record. They don't deny it. Their greatest hope is that people are going to forget. We had the minister just now describe it as some kind of 'mysterious alchemy'. The people of Australia have got another word for it: rorting. It's using taxpayers' money as if it were their own money. And taxpayers will not forget. They remember the land deal that gave hope to every dodgy second-hand car dealer in the country. If you can get $30 million for a $3 million package of land then your dad's bashed up Datsun down the back of the garage has got to be worth a royal fortune.

The sports rorts of $100 million were a real special. They set up a program to build women's change rooms. Lord knows it's needed, but, for God's sake, don't give it to any of those sporting clubs with women's sporting teams! They ploughed it into clubs that didn't have women's sporting teams. The big daddy of them all was 'pork 'n' ride'. It's big by any standard—$4 billion dollars—supposedly for urban infrastructure, but its real purpose is not to save the jobs of Australians doing it tough but to save the Prime Minister's job. We already know that $660 million has been spent on dodgy car parks. The member for Scullin has gone through it in great detail. There were four car parks in the Victorian seat of Kooyong, five in the Victorian seat of Deakin and six in the seat of Goldstein. Let's have a look at who holds these seats, shall we? When you look at them, there are three rogues: they're all blokes, they're all blue-suit wearers, and they're all liberals, but the thing that struck me is that they're all key figures. We've got the member for Goldstein, a bloke who guzzles his own bathwater and was appointed by the Liberals as the chair of the economics committee; the member for Deakin, another interesting character, who, when he's not stacking branches in an attempt to get rid of the member for Goldstein, is the Assistant Treasurer—that's his side hustle; and then, of course, the member for Kooyong, the federal Treasurer, the bloke who says yes to every pork barrel that rolls past his office but no to JobKeeper. These are the people who are making key economic decisions for this country, and they are the key architects of one of the biggest rorts that this parliament has ever seen. These guys have $4 billion all lined up—your money, taxpayers' money—and they want to use it as if it's Liberal Party money to secure their next federal election.

The people of Australia will not cop it. The Audit Office ran a key comb all over this dodgy program, and they found that 75 per cent of the grants went to Liberal Party seats. It's not surprising, because only Liberal Party MPs were entitled to apply for the money. They're not even good at rorting, because the auditor found they spent 400 per cent more on these dodgy car parks than they would have if they had gone to an open tender. Four hundred per cent more. And how does the minister describe it? Mysterious alchemy! The Australian people have got another name for it. It's not mysterious alchemy; it's rorting.

It's time we called BS on this mob who try to make themselves out as good at managing money—but they are good at managing taxpayers' money into Liberal Party rorts. The people of Australia are not going to buy it. It's not Liberal Party money; it's the Australian taxpayers' money. And, yes, we have a problem with urban congestion and, yes, we need some car parks. But this money should be distributed on the basis of merit and need, not this mysterious alchemy, which ordinary Australians know is nothing more than corruption and rorting—and we will not have it!

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