Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

Last night I was making the point that the Australian people had not heard of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee before the election, because it wasn't an election commitment from this government. The only reason we are here using precious time in this parliament to debate the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee Bill 2023 is the dirty deal done by the Labor Party in order to get one of their industrial relations bills through the Senate. The problem when you make dirty deals in order to just facilitate politics, like this government does, is that you waste Australian people's money. This is going to cost $8.7 million.

I know that the government on the other side of the chamber throw millions and billions around—it just sort of rolls off the tongue. At a time when they have just wasted $400 million on a referendum they now want to waste another nearly $10 million on a committee to advise them on things they should already know. What on earth do members of the government do for their day jobs? If they're not out there listening to the Australian people and getting a feeling for the things that they need and the policies they need, why on earth are they here?

Why on earth do they need to set up a body that's going to cost nearly $10 million to give them advice that they can then ignore? That's the other inconvenient truth of this whole charade that we're going through with the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. When it was set up in an interim fashion before being legislated it provided the government with a whole lot of advice and the government ignored it—I think quite rightly, given some of the advice that came out of it.

These are all hand-picked fellow travellers of the Labor government. The chair of the soon-to-be-legislated Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee is the former member for Jagajaga. What was she doing recently? She was just administering the Labor Party in Victoria. That's what she was doing. She was just administering the Labor Party of Victoria, deciding who was getting preselected and who wasn't. She was wielding quite extraordinary power in the Labor Party. Now it's proposed that she will chair this new legislated committee. There will be other fellow travellers, like the head of the ACTU, Sally McManus. It sounds like a bit of a make-work program for fellow travellers of the Labor Party.

If the government are saying that they need a separate body of unelected individuals outside of the Public Service or a department to give them advice on these sorts of matters then really the government have fallen a lot further than most Australians think. This is a government whose priorities are utterly wrong. This is a government that wants to talk about anything other than the issues that are affecting Australian people. I know that the Labor Party think that this $8.7 million is just someone else's money. It's someone else's hard-earned money. Do they realise that every day Australians get up, they get on the train, get in the car or get in their ute to go to work and they voluntarily pay their taxes—begrudgingly in some cases? The deal is that the government ensures that every single dollar is spent wisely.

Spending $8.7 million to get a group of fellow travellers of the Labor Party sitting around together thinking up new ways they can get the government to spend more money, for the government to then ignore, is just an embarrassment. It is an utter embarrassment. The fact is that this was negotiated with Senator David Pocock in order to get his support for a piece of industrial relations law. And there is obviously the union wish list, which every Labor government gets on day 1 after they're elected. They get the wish list—the unions walk in the door, and they say to the Prime Minister and each of the ministers, 'Here's the wish list; it's the list that we need you to deliver in exchange for all the support we've given you.' I give credit to the government! They're very studiously working through the union wish list, one by one, crossing off every item on the wish list from the unions!

The problem is that, here, we've got—sure, in the context of the Australian budget, it is a relatively small amount—$8.7 million that is literally being flushed down the drain. That's $8.7 million taken out of the pocket of a hardworking Australian, who contributes their taxes for the greater good of this country on the basis that the government zealously guards that dollar and spends it properly or spends it to help another Australian. It is not so a group of people who—let's be frank—are already doing very well for themselves, who are all high-income earners themselves, can come together and prognosticate to the government their wisdom, their remarkable wisdom. Seriously, if those opposite don't get enough belief in themselves from their electorates, or from their stakeholders if they're a minister, then they're in the wrong job. Give it up. Give it to somebody else. If you need an unelected body to tell you these things, spending $8.7 million in the process, then you're in the wrong game.

But the truth is, I suspect, in the defence of many of those opposite, that this was just a dirty deal in order to get a piece of legislation through. They know that they don't need this. They know that this is akin to pouring $8.7 million down the drain, down the gurgler. But they just see that as a cost of doing business, for them to get their destructive agenda for the Australian economy through the Senate.

We're all realistic in this place. We're all realistic. But to use taxpayers' money in such a wanton fashion to bring forward this bill is, I think, shameful. On a day like today, when we've just had a bill rammed through this House, a bill that doesn't keep dangerous, violent non-citizens detained, by the way, but a bill that still ensures that those people are roaming free in our community, we are using precious legislative time in a threadbare agenda from this government on something like this? Instead of the government focusing on their core duty of keeping Australians safe—instead of the government putting their energies towards developing legislation to ensure that murderers, rapists and paedophiles stay behind bars in detention rather than roaming the streets—they've used their energies on this, to appoint a whole lot of fellow travellers at the cost of $8.7 million. It just highlights that the priorities of this government are all wrong.

How on earth could a government think of doing this, today, when there are people fearful in the community of those who have perpetrated domestic violence against them? The government offers no solution to that.

Instead of dealing with that problem in a thorough way that keeps those people detained, we're dealing with this trifling matter at a cost of $8.7 million for advice that's going to be ignored by the government. Mark my words: nothing will come out of this Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee that remarkably changes the law of this country or the economic direction of this country. It will come up with recommendations that the government will ignore. It will prepare papers and reports that will go into a drawer somewhere, never to be read, never to be looked at.

Meanwhile, we've got a government saying: 'It's all too hard. We're sorry, Australia, but there are now 84, and potentially hundreds more, violent criminals, the worst of the worst, who are going to be wandering our community.' And this bill is what the time in this chamber is being used for today.

See this speech in context