Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

They can all read and write, Senator Heffernan. They are on our committee. What we have here is another smash and grab, another situation where the government is simply going to say: ‘We don’t care what the parliament thinks. We don’t care what the people of Australia think. We are just going to ram this through as fast as we can because we’ve got the numbers.’ Ten long years and the arrogance is shining brightly. The Prime Minister promised there would not be abuses of the Senate. The Prime Minister really has changed since he got control of both chambers. He has tossed all the promises out—no surprise to those of us on this side: just tossed them away. We are going to have a whitewash of a committee and a whitewash of a report, rushed through with no genuine consideration and no genuine interest whatsoever. It is not surprising because the scam that the government is trying to pull on the Australian public is to deliver Australia one of the most concentrated media industries in the world. Only probably North Korea is going to have a more concentrated media than we are going to have after this. North Korea or maybe Lebanon, I do not know.