Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I perfectly understand the theatre of politics and I do understand that those on the opposite side are meant to come into this place, pluck figures out of the air and just read the talking points that they have been given. But I would implore upon them, if they are genuine about the crisis of confidence that is engulfing politics in this country, to actually speak the truth. That is because what we have is people like Senator Cameron and Senator O'Neill coming here and reading verbatim what is put in front of them, with no regard to the veracity of the claims that they make.

Senator O'Neill has reflected about changes to health and changes to education. Let us put this in perspective: there are no changes in the forward estimates and, in fact, there are actually improvements in the forward estimates from when we came into government for health, pensions and education. But what Senator O'Neill is referring to is these ridiculous last-minute decisions of their government, which said, 'In 2020, 2025 or 2050, we are going to put more money into something.' The money was never there. It was a figment of the then Prime Minister's—I cannot even recall who was, quite frankly; it could have been Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard—imagination. It was a falsehood peddled upon the Australian people.

The result of that is that we have the likes of Senator Cameron and Senator O'Neill coming in here, who make the spurious claims and who pluck elements of a speech and then try to portray that without any context around it. It is demeaning. I have respect the Senator O'Neill. I even have respect to Senator Cameron, albeit that he is part of the socialist mob and a much different philosophical line than myself. He does believe in something. But this diminishes them in the public capacity.

Let me make the point that the crisis of trust in politics and politicians in this country is born of the actions of the New South Wales Labor Party and the federal Labor Party, because the federal Labor Party backed up that man who abused the trust of many thousands of union members, Mr Craig Thomson. Mr Craig Thomson, we will recall, was a man who used hard-earned money of those low-paid workers from the Health Services Union for prostitutes and to rent the red ruby room in New South Wales for his prostitutes. What sort of betrayal of trust is that? We also know that those on the other side—including Senator Dastyari, as he was the shop steward for the Labor Party at the time—spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of Labor Party funds defending Craig Thomson, defending the indefensible.