Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President. As I was saying in response to the interjection from Senator David Bushby, a good friend of mine, Senator Bushby, through you, Madam Chair, it was not just a large amount of money—history now records it as the largest political donation ever given to a political party in Australia. So the next time the Australian Greens stand up in this place and seek to condemn a member of the coalition or seek to condemn a member of the Australian Labor Party in relation to the taking of donations, perhaps they need to reflect on the fact that it is they themselves that received $1.7 million from Mr Graeme Wood, the founder of wotif.

As I stated, the first superannuation bill that was discussed by the Senate earlier today, as Senator Ian Macdonald said, was the legalisation of theft. The Labor Party are now just blindly robbing the people of Australia in order to pay off their debt. What they do with this bill here is almost as bad, almost as evil. The bill as originally drafted would have changed the investment strategy of many Australians not by choice but by forcing the transfer of potentially large amounts of money from funds where individuals have made a clear and active choice—so I as an individual have made a choice in relation to where my superannuation is going to go—to a MySuper default product. What is worse is that the way the bill was drafted the Australian government did not have to tell me prior to forcing my superannuation into their fund, an industry fund, that they were doing it. The Labor government wanted to force an Australian citizen who has exercised choice in relation to their superannuation fund to have that money transferred into the MySuper default product, and they did not even have the guts to tell the individual that that is what they were going to do.