Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

For two years. We did not mandate that. We said that, if schools were going to put out material or put up signs, then they should acknowledge the Commonwealth government. Did we mandate that? No, we did not. I refer honourable senators to appendix 4 on page 19 of the guidelines, which makes it quite clear that we did not require schools to do so.

I cannot, in living memory, remember a government being caught out red-handed like this government has been. There had been no excuse delivered by the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister up until today. There was no legitimate excuse given by the Special Minister of State or by Senator Arbib, who was tasked with the job of doing the dirty work of the government in relation to this sort of political advertising. The mantra of this government is: ‘Send out the one with the best reputation to get down and dirty and do whatever is required to win the election again.’

You only need to look at abuses of the Commonwealth Electoral Act by the Labor Party. They have form in relation to this—serious form. You have the fake Labor enrolments in Queensland, where a number of ALP operatives ended up in jail. You have the Shepherdson inquiry, where a number of ALP members were forced to resign. You have the Christian Zahra and Gino Mandarino false enrolments. Gino Mandarino and Mike Kaiser, who were both found guilty of false enrolment, are now back working as Labor staffers. This is how seriously federal Labor takes this sort of matter. I am looking forward to my friend Senator Feeney’s defence of this program when he stands up, because there is no defence. He knows that the only legitimate way to get out of this is to pull these signs down—8,000 bits of Labor propaganda using kids and their parents and teachers and school communities as pawns in a cheap political game.

The community are, quite rightly, absolutely outraged about this. They will be even more outraged when they read tomorrow morning that the government has been caught red-handed. No-one should underestimate the significance of the Australian Electoral Commission putting out a press release saying that a government of the day has breached the Commonwealth Electoral Act. There is no greater crime for a government than to do so. This government must immediately undertake to pull every one of those signs down within the next seven days.