Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw, Mr Acting Deputy President. Let me just state the facts. During Senator Brown’s contribution I said to him, ‘What about your action with the Traveston Crossing dam in Queensland? That was dishonest,’ to which he replied, ‘There’s Senator Macdonald defending the rorters.’ I do not know what terminology you give to that, but it certainly was not truthful—but that is the way the Greens political party carry on. I am talking about the Traveston Crossing dam; he is pointing at me and saying, ‘There’s Senator Macdonald defending the rorters.’ I was not defending the rorters; I was pointing out to the Senate and to Senator Brown, who knew it in any case, that in fact it was his political party who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of Queenslanders. I think Senator Brown canoed down the Mary River; at the least he was in the area of Traveston Crossing saying, ‘We’re going to save Queensland from this dam. We’re going to save the Mary River. We’re totally opposed to the Traveston Crossing dam.’ That was just before the Queensland state election, and then what did he do? The Greens political party in Queensland gave voting preferences to Anna Bligh’s Labor Party, who were committed to building the Traveston Crossing dam. It was a relatively close election in Queensland.

The difference, and the reason Anna Bligh won government, was that Labor received the preferences of the Greens political party in the crucial electorates in the Queensland election. Because of that, Labor won the state election and proceeded with their policy, which they had announced, to build the Traveston Crossing dam, against all ecological and environmental advice and against the petitions of environmental activists and local people. All were totally opposed to the dam—and, I might say, so were the Liberal and National parties. But the Greens, by giving their preferences to Labor, ensured that the Labor government would have its way and that dam would be constructed.

You ask me about the semantics of what you would call the Greens. You make up your own mind. But it seems to me that they are perhaps even worse than Mr Rudd and his all-spin, all-talk and no action program. The Greens simply say one thing for the hearing of voters and do the exact opposite. The sooner the Greens political party are brought to account, as soon as the hypocrisy of their policies is better known by the Australian public, the better off democracy in Australia will be.

I say this time and time again: many people support the Greens political party because they believe it stands for the environment and trees and koalas when in fact it is a very radical left-wing socialist party which some, rightly in my view, describe as being a communist party by another name. I do not associate those remarks with every single one of the Greens senators in this parliament. There are some who I think are genuine environmentalists, but there are some who I think the public of Australia should carefully watch in what they say and what they do, particularly before close elections, as I understand are occurring in South Australia and Tasmania at the present time.

I leave that there and again refer to Senator Hutchins’s quite amazing contribution to the debate on this report. What concerns me about electoral reform in this state is that it does not address the widespread rorting for which the Labor Party in my state of Queensland is well known. I refer back—admittedly it was a few years ago but it encapsulates so well the culture of the ALP in Queensland—to when Karen Ehrmann, then a Labor councillor on the Townsville City Council, was jailed for vote rigging. In her evidence, then and at subsequent inquiries, she referred to the culture of the ALP in vote rigging, mainly for internal Labor Party purposes. As we all know, Mr Mike Kaiser, formerly a Queensland Labor member of the state parliament, was forced to resign over false enrolment claims. I might add that he has just been appointed on the nod of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, to a $450,000 job in government relations in a government company called NBN Co Ltd. That is what happened to Mr Kaiser after this vote rigging, but Mr Kaiser was only following what was the culture of the Labor Party at the time. At the time of inquiries into Ms Ehrmann’s part, back in October 2000, an article was written by David Solomon, which said:

Ehrmann said her prosecution and jailing had been due to her falling out with the faction over her refusal to support Councillor Tony Mooney in his bid for preselection for the state seat of Townsville. She said she had been warned of the consequences of supporting the Left’s Mike Reynolds. ‘We were threatened, we were bullied, we were pushed from pillar to post and warned that if we did not support Tony Mooney we would be destroyed,’ Ms Ehrmann told the inquiry. ‘I would be destroyed politically and publicly.’

The article went on:

There was a large-scale falsification of the electoral rolls—a federal criminal offence—and Ehrmann says that mail was also stolen and Electoral Commission documents improperly obtained and used by the Labor Party.

The series of articles at the time went on to talk about that culture of vote rigging and fraudulent action in the Queensland Labor Party in those years and, as Senator Ronaldson mentioned in his contribution, it seems to be all happening again.

The locals in Townsville, according to press reports, certainly do not want Mr Tony Mooney as their candidate; they want Councillor Jenny Hill, quite an effective councillor on the current Townsville City Council. They want her or the former burger king, a very prominent Townsville gentleman, who owns all the McDonald’s franchises in Townsville. The locals want one of those two. But Mr Rudd has indicated that he would prefer Mr Mooney and so, as I read press reports, the National Executive of the Labor Party has unilaterally said from Sydney, ‘That is who you will have to represent you in Townsville.’ Going a bit further south into the marginal seat of Dawson, they have also said that, against local wishes, in appointing the Mayor of Bowen—or Whitsundays as it now is—as their candidate. (Time expired)