Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is only one director of a political party in this country who is in trouble. He is in prison for a $1.5 million fraud, which he has pleaded guilty to, and he is awaiting sentence. The Greens and Senator Rhiannon are living in a world that does not actually match the reality. We know that the Greens in Tasmania got the largest single donation in our history, from Mr Cousins. To her credit, Senator Rhiannon has spoken out about political donations. But she did not have the courage of her convictions to follow that through. She wrote an article condemning political donations, and she did it as a ghost writer. Why wouldn't you just put your name to it? Once you are found out you look like a fraud, and that is very embarrassing.

Labor does stand for political donation reform. We are on the record, we put a bill into this place when we were in government. Unfortunately those opposite, when they were in opposition, voted it down. And there are very good reasons why they voted it down. We heard from Senator O'Sullivan today the list of donations that the Labor Party gets from unions. That is true. And do you know what? That is on the public record. But unfortunately the donations to the Liberal Party are not on the public record because they are channelled through all sorts of sneaky little clubs. I tried to do a bit of a search today and I came up with a few of them across the nation. In Western Australia we have the 500 Club, a very famous associated entity. You can put your money in there and you never get found out and it gets channelled through to the Liberal Party. We also have the Higgins 500 Club, which is the same thing: you put your money through there in secret and it gets channelled through to the Liberal Party. We have the Kooyong 200 Club, the Team 200 Club, the Warringah Club—and on and on it goes.

Recently, at ICAC in New South Wales, we heard about the Free Enterprise Foundation. We know that, since 2009, political donations to the New South Wales Liberal Party from property developers have been banned. But they found another way around that rule, and so they set up the Free Enterprise Foundation. The sole purpose was to channel donations from property developers through to the Liberal Party. Also revealed in ICAC were brown bags full of cash—money that I have never seen my life—handed over to candidates Cornwell and Owen. A brown paper bag was handed over to Mr Cornwell as he sat in the front seat of a Bentley. There was $10,000 in that brown bag! Then the same Bentley was used again. Mr Owen sat in the front and received $10,000. Who in their right mind would think that receiving money in a brown bag was okay? Who would think that? Why wouldn't the alarm bells of morality and ethics start to ring when you got that sort of money?

We saw that ICAC even claimed the scalp of the premier, Mr O'Farrell, in New South Wales. But it goes further. We had Senator Sinodinos in here having to step down from Australian Water Holdings, and we are still waiting for ICAC—