Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

The news has broken that New South Wales Labor rising star and 2016 Senate candidate Simon Zhou has resigned as a Sussex Street staffer under questions about his dodgy donations and his involvement in a gold tax scam. There are many, many questions that need to be answered, not just by Mr Zhou, but by the web of dodgy deals that has been done by the ALP and highlighted in a Walkley-award-winning form by Fairfax Media and the ABC. They have thrown a light upon a very murky aspect of Australian politics.

But let's get some background: the ALP are closely linked, in a financial sense, with people in this country who are strongly linked to the Communist Party of China. They are effectively, by their own admission in some instances, acting to further Chinese government aims in Australian politics. And we can take this back quite some way. In my time in this place, there was the case of Joel Fitzgibbon, who was ultimately forced to resign as defence minister. He was forced to resign because of a conflict of interest in a meeting, but before that he was closely linked—closely linked—to Helen Lu, who was not only a donor of suits to Mr Fitzgibbon and not only a provider of his accommodation here in Canberra but also closely linked to a former lieutenant-colonel who had high-level contacts in Beijing and who was also linked to the funnelling of funny money for support of the Bill Clinton campaign. In fact, Ms Lu was exposed today by Fairfax Media as having these in-depth links to the funny money contributors. That was years ago.

Then we had the former foreign minister, former Senator Bob Carr. Senator Carr was Premier of New South Wales. He had retired and then was suddenly brought out of retirement and slung into the Senate by the right wing in New South Wales. He was made foreign minister, where he strutted the world stage, complaining about business class, and then suddenly he dropped out again. Now, former Senator Carr is head of the Australia-Chinese Research Institute, which is an institute funded by one of the people named in the Four Corners report, Mr Huang, to the tune of $1.8 million. Senator Carr was defending one Chinese donation in The Australian newspaper recently, but he omitted a whole range of other facts, such as his employment prospects and his employment of people associated with Mr Huang. His advocacy for China within the cabinet and outside—there are so many questions that need to be answered by Mr Carr.

Indeed, there are also questions that need to be answered by some in the coalition. The coalition accepted $770,000 from one of the individuals named in the Four Corners report the other night. That same person gave a $100,000 donation to Mr Andrew Robb's fundraising account when he was then trade minister. At the Liberal Party fundraising function at Etihad Stadium, I am told that dinner with the Prime Minister was bought for $125,000, through an auction process. The auction was actually conducted in Chinese. The underbidder who, of course, missed out, was also given the opportunity to top up his bid and buy dinner with the Prime Minister for $125,000 too. The funny thing is that I was in the Liberal Party for 30 years and no-one is willing or able to tell me the names of those two people. Why is it such a secret? Has the dinner been taken with the Prime Minister? What was discussed? These are the sorts of questions that reasonable people are asking. We need answers to them.

But no-one has more questions to answer in this place than my old sparring partner, Senator Dastyari.

You will remember, Mr President, that I raised the matter that Senator Dastyari had not only had a $5,000 donation by Mr Huang, one of the people named in the Four Corners report, to pay a media bill but also had declared he had a personal bill paid at his request by another person with close links to the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the defence of those on that side who said, 'There's nothing wrong. There's nothing to see here. It's all okay,' eventually Senator Dastyari fell on his sword or was stabbed in the front or the back—however you want to characterise it—and was put into—