Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I would like to present you with a list of some of the great pork barrels of recent Australian political history: the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, $443 million; the Safer Communities Fund, $184 million; sports rorts, $100 million; the Paladin contract for Manus Island, $532 million; and, the big one, Canstruct on Nauru, $1.8 billion. This is public money—it's our money—which was shamelessly used to buy votes by the previous government. We thought things would be better with the Albanese government, but the culture of transaction persists. We've seen that with the community battery scheme, which bypassed the department and was not subjected to independent review.

Pork-barrelling costs us all. It's money which is spent by political parties to win votes, and that money means less money for education, housing and health. It corrodes trust in government, and it risks entrenching power and skewing election results. It is left to those of us who are not entrenched in those parties to stop the government of the day and the previous government from using public money to further their own political ends.

I thank the member for Indi for bringing us this important private member's bill, and I commend it to the House on behalf of the voters of Kooyong, who've had enough of government graft and dishonesty.

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