Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

They do it with style. Lord Michael Ashcroft gave a million dollars in 2004 to the Liberal Party. A foreign resident chipped in a million dollars to the Liberal Party.

These are issues that just beggar belief. This pale green political party, the pale Greens of the Senate, are out there in absolute, abject embarrassment, putting up this bill because they did not have the bottle, they did not have the guts, they did not have the capacity, to deliver on this when they were negotiating in their own interests to lock other progressive political parties out of the Senate. They did not have the guts or the capacity to force changes to political donations.

I want to come back again to why it is so important to change this political donation issue. I have said on a number of occasions that in New South Wales you have got a multimillionaire property developer in Newcastle rolling up in a Bentley, opening the door so a Liberal Party MP can jump in, and handing over a brown paper bag with $10,000 in $100 notes in it to the Liberal Party MP in Newcastle. That is what is happening with the Liberals. There are trust funds established all over the country by the Liberals. There are what are called associated entities from the Liberals all over the country. These associated entities are funnelling money anonymously into the Liberal Party. We have heard much about the money that has been donated from the trade union movement to the Labor Party.