Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Once again I stand tonight on a very critical piece of legislation, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Pension Loans Scheme Enhancements) Bill 2021, which deals with the welfare of older Australians who are relying on the pension. We have the Labor party yet again playing games by moving a second reading amendment. They know it. The member opposite knows it. Yet they can't help themselves. There is nothing that they will not play games on.

So here, once again, we have an opportunity to debate how to make the lives of ordinary Australians, people who spent their entire working lives saving for their retirement, better, and we have the Labor party moving a second reading amendment so they can post on their stupid, silly and idiotic website run by that front group the OpenAustralia Foundation, which will no doubt say that every member of the House on this side strongly—as though I get to say, 'Mr Speaker, I'm not just voting for this but strongly voting for this'—voted against the welfare of pensioners. Let's be very clear about that. This is dishonest politics by the Labor party. These are untruths. This is misinformation. This is the sort of stuff they accuse Clive Palmer of doing day in and day out, and they do it, and they don't try to stop it. They're in this parliament enabling it.

We've seen it today already. We saw today on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper not known for its support of any sensible party of government or any sensible political movement in this country, that the award-winning journalist Rob Harris has undertaken an investigation that I think Bernstein and Woodward would have been proud of, to discover that those crossbenchers who claim to be Independents and disaffected Liberals comment are fake Liberals and fake Independents but are real supporters of the Labor Party.

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