Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have long desired the confected outrage of Senator Wong in this place. She walked into the chamber before because one of her shadow ministers had moved a procedural motion in the Senate that facilitated a debate; and the Senate partook in that debate, as is allowed under the standing orders. The contempt of the Labor Party for the Senate is shown in the utter hypocrisy of what we have heard so far this afternoon. Only a few weeks ago we sat here all night to deal with a piece of legislation on which the Labor Party had decided to filibuster. We have all sat here when the Labor Party, sometimes joined by their colleagues in the Greens, have prevented the Senate from dealing with important legislation—through the techniques of deferral, referral to committee, repeatedly referring similar bills to committees and at no point allowing or facilitating the Senate to debate them.

We sat here when the Labor-Greens government had a majority in the Senate. At one point, more than 30 bills were subject to a guillotine. Bills that had never had a word uttered on them, and amendments that had never been debated or even presented in this chamber, were guillotined on a Thursday afternoon in order to meet the secret deals that had been done by Labor and the Greens—and, with all those internal trade-offs, who knows who was to benefit from that?

As we have seen this week, the interests of the Labor Party cannot be in any way separated from the interests of the trade union movement. Not only did they legislate to put a union at the centre of a tribunal that is dedicated to nothing less than explicitly putting small business out of operation and explicitly putting the homes and livelihoods of struggling Australian small businesses at risk; they then used the taxpayer to write a $200,000 cheque to support the operation and the publicity of that particular tribunal. That same body—a body that the Labor government handed money over to—then wrote cheques to the Labor Party to support their election campaign.

In the corporate world, those related party transactions are subject to some sort of disclosure; they are subject to protections in the interests of shareholders. But, in the view of the Labor Party, the public till is something to be raided for your members, who then write cheques for you with fungible money to support your re-election.

Yesterday we had the deputy leader of the Labor Party insulting the Governor-General—a decent man by anyone's measure—in this place and thereby degrading this chamber. I have not seen many of those opposite stand up and say that that was simply inappropriate for someone who holds an important office.