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

Everything under the sun is in order because of your second reading amendment, so you can't have it both ways. The Labor Party can't come in here and move second reading amendments so that they can facilitate the misinformation that the OpenAustralia Foundation goes on with all the time. The member opposite can carry on as much as he likes about it but he is just as guilty of using this parliament not for debate or for actually improving the lives of pensioners but for simply playing undergraduate political games. You don't like being called out on it, but the truth is I'm going to stand here on every piece of legislation and call you out on it, because what you have been doing over the last five years is appalling and it denigrates our democracy, and frankly you all should be ashamed of yourselves. Sorry, those opposite should be ashamed of themselves, because they take votes from the crossbench, who—as we found out about this today on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, from the award-winning journalist Rob Harris, who has clearly undertaken months of investigation to understand this—vote 88 per cent of the time with the Labor Party and say that they're in favour of the climate, integrity and transparency.

Well, wow! Wasn't this a doozy of a day! The front page of the Herald! No doubt, this story has been there for any other news organisation to report on—the ABC, Crikey, the New Daily—but it took an intrepid reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, which is not, as I say, a paper known for its support of right-of-centre political movements, to actually finally say: 'The hypocrisy stinks so much we are going to report on it.' And those opposite take their votes. What we found today was that those on the crossbench have been accepting donations from coal investors—not just coalmines but directors of coal companies. They are not just normal coal investors. These coal investors bought their coalmines from Eddie Obeid.

So we have both honest and untransparent. We have—

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