Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The New South Wales Labor government is the most conscientiously incompetent government in our country, perhaps even in our history. Their failures are manifold and the bad news is they are not finished yet. On Saturday, the people of Cabramatta have the opportunity to send the New South Wales Labor government the mother of all messages. The way Labor have treated Cabramatta is the way they have treated the people of New South Wales. The retiring member, Reba Meagher treated the electorate with total contempt. It was nothing more than a vehicle for her own ambition, as she lived on the other side of the city in her trendy Coogee flat.

Reba Meagher took the phrase ‘latte Labor’ in Sydney to a whole new level and now, when she has had enough, when she is done with it, she walks away, without the slightest thought for those who elected her for the past 14 years. Why should the electorate be any different in terms of how Reba Meagher treated them? This is how she treated the state of New South Wales as a minister. It was during Reba Meagher’s tenure as health minister that hospitals crumbled, patients died and mothers had miscarriages in toilets. Her seeming indifference betrayed the conscience of the New South Wales Labor government. So Reba Meagher is gone. If there was ever a time for Labor to show their renewal in Cabramatta and more generally across the state of New South Wales, it is now, to select a candidate for the future. Instead, the Labor Party in New South Wales have shown that they have run out of ideas, they have run out of leaders and they have run out of talent. It is time for the people of Cabramatta to run out on Labor.

The Labor candidate, Labor Fairfield mayor, Nick Lalich, is a close ally of that well-known identity in New South Wales political circles Joe Tripodi and is apparently Labor’s symbol of great renewal. Yet within days the true colour of the old Labor had emerged. I quote from the Sydney Morning Herald, which reveals:

THE ALP candidate for the state seat of Cabramatta was dining with developers and businessmen, including Pat Sergi …

Pat Sergi, as some of you may remember, was the one to whom 11 pages were devoted in the report of the Woodward royal commission into drug trafficking in 1979. The dinner was a by-election fundraiser just two days before the new New South Wales Premier, Nathan Rees, called for political donations to become a thing of the past. The Sydney Morning Herald says:

On the night of his fund-raiser, Cr Lalich failed to attend—

of all things—

a Fairfield council meeting that discussed new regulations about council codes of conduct and political donations.

I remind the House that this was at the same time that the New South Wales ICAC had recommended charges against four Labor councillors in the City of Wollongong based on their conduct in similar activities there. The article continues:

In 2003 Cr Lalich was a director of Tojomi Pty Ltd, with two other Fairfield councillors and two Fairfield property developers. The company was able to take advantage of a change in building height restrictions on land in the Liverpool council area, which the previous owner claimed had not been available to him. Tojomi made a windfall profit on the land.

So we have the Labor Party picking a candidate that conforms to the practices of the past, and it is about time that the people of Cabramatta got to have a better go because Labor simply does not get it.

By contrast, the Liberals have put forward a candidate in Dai Le that the people of Cabramatta can put their trust in. She has had an incredible life story and she is someone that the people of Cabramatta can really get behind. Dai fled Vietnam with her mother and two sisters during the fall of Saigon in 1975. They waited for their father in a refugee camp in the Philippines for four years, but he never made it. Her mother bundled them onto a boat again for another escape attempt, and after 10 days at sea they were picked up by a Hong Kong patrol boat and taken to another refugee camp. Dai Le’s mother then decided to bring her daughters to ‘an island with a good education’, she said, to start a new life and put the nightmare of the Vietnam War behind them. Dai and her family first settled in Wollongong, where there were few Vietnamese. She was 11 years old and had to learn English quickly to blend in with the community. She then moved to Cabramatta with her family.

Dai is now an acclaimed journalist with ABC Radio National’s social and history unit, where she produces radio documentaries. She became a journalist so that she could be a voice for people who had no voice and share their concerns. Dai is running for parliament so that she can continue to be the voice of those people in the community of Cabramatta. On Saturday the people of Cabramatta have an opportunity to put an end to the sham that is the New South Wales state Labor government by sending them the message that they will simply not tolerate this conscientious incompetence anymore.