Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In politics we talk a lot about the pub test. What would the average bloke or woman in the pub think about what we do here? If you're fair dinkum you normally pass; if you're full of it, you'll probably fail. Here is a pub test. There's a pub in Nelligen, about 130-odd kilometres away from here in Canberra. It's called the Steampacket Hotel. It's Paul Parker's local watering hole. Paul Parker is the bloke who became famous a couple of weeks ago when he drove his RFS truck up to the media and gave the Prime Minister both barrels. I can't repeat what he said to the TV camera, but I think you'll probably remember the footage.

I tell this story because last week a mate of mine went to the Steampacket Hotel and heard something interesting. The bloke behind the bar told him people have been coming in over the last few weeks and putting money on the bar for Paul. People have been ringing in as well from as far away as Queensland, putting money on the tab for Paul Parker. He's not going to have to pay for a beer again at the Steampacket Hotel for a long, long time. If that's not the ultimate pub test, then I don't know what is.

This government has a serious problem of its own making. People are angry. They're angry that the Prime Minister went missing in the teeth of the bushfire crisis. They're angry that when he came back he gave excuses and said that he didn't hold a hose. A bloke said to me the other day, 'Winston Churchill didn't fly Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, but didn't go skiing in Switzerland either.' They're angry that it's taken the government so long to help.

You didn't have to be Nostrodamus to know that this was potentially getting to be a black summer. Until the rains of a few days ago, most of the country has been bone dry. Parts of Australia haven't had rain in years. Add extreme heat and extreme wind and you can get what we've had over the last few weeks and over the last few months. What's worse, experts warned us that this was possible and gave us advice about what we should do. Four years ago the National Aerial Firefighting Centre wrote a submission to this parliament calling on the government to create a national water bombing fleet. It was rejected by the government. In April last year 23 former firefighters asked to meet with the PM. They asked the parliament to set up an inquiry to see if we had all the resources we needed across the country for the bushfires. Both of those were rejected. In November we wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to convene COAG, a meeting with premiers, to do essentially the same thing: to see that we had enough resources to fight the fires that were already under way. That was rejected too. We got a letter back saying it wasn't necessary. Just imagine how different things might have been if the Prime Minister had agreed to any of those requests. No wonder people are angry. They feel abandoned, and abandonment takes a long time to forgive.

On top of that, while the fires are still burning, we find out about sports rorts. Just imagine for a second if you needed a heart transplant and you were at the top of the list and a heart becomes available, and you find out you don't get the heart—somebody else further down on the list got it because of political interference. If that happened it would be a scandal. The same sort of thing has happened here. Mums and dads have put in applications. They're the ones that run sporting clubs as volunteers. They were independently assessed and ranked. Then the government ripped them up and allocated money not to the best projects, but to projects in marginal seats. Seventy-three per cent of the projects they funded weren't recommended by the independent assessor. Bronwyn Bishop lost her job for a $5,000 helicopter ride to a Liberal Party fundraiser. This is $100 million of taxpayers' money used like this. You can only imagine what the people at the Steampacket Hotel, or any other pub in Australia, think about that.

The worst part of this is that not one person in the government has had the honesty or decency to even admit that anything wrong has been done here. That's treating people with contempt. Worse than that, it's treating people like idiots, and that's dangerous. The Prime Minister is right when he says there are lots of quiet Australians. They don't tweet and they don't go to protests. But they run soccer clubs, they run netball clubs and footy clubs, and after everything that they've seen over the last few weeks, I reckon they're saying very, very quietly under their breath the same thing that Paul Parker yelled to that TV camera a couple of weeks ago.