Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In answer to the question that I asked of Minister Cormann today, I got a response that has been backed up rather feebly by Senator Duniam. He said, 'Of course we don't have reckless National Party members dictating to the government on economic policy.' But the reality is very different. If we are to believe Senator Duniam's assurances, he's also going to say that this is a mysterious group and it doesn't exist. But the problem with that argument, really, is that Mr George Christensen has self-identified as part of that group. It's not a mysterious, secret group; it is a group. He's out there, and it's reported in the press. And it is being reported in the press because he's told them so! He's directly quoted as being part of that.

Now, the assurances that we received from the ministers and that we received from senators on the other side is that they actually care about the issue, 'We're considering our response, we've got things in train and we've got some legislation ready to go'—even though we haven't seen it yet—'but trust us; it's going to get there because the National Party isn't the tail that's wagging the Liberal Party dog.' That's what they try to tell us: the National Party is not the tail wagging the Liberal Party dog.

Now, you might think that that could be true, based on the numbers in the National Party versus the Liberal Party, unless we look at the track record. Let's look at the track record of the National Party tail wagging the Liberal Party dog. You only have to look at one of the biggest issues where we saw a backflip: the royal commission into the banking system. How many times did we see the very minister here today saying: 'The Nationals aren't dictating our policy to us on the banking royal commission. There's no need to have one. We don't need one; it's all under control, it's all happening'? But the very same National Party members who were pursuing that proposition kept at it and at it and at it, and where did we see that land? All of a sudden, the government takes the position: 'Oh! We've now had another think about it: we do need a royal commission into the banks'—something that we'd been telling them for a long, long time. But it took those same National Party people from within their coalition to actually make them do it. Why? Because they are the tail that is wagging the Liberal Party dog on economic policy.

We've not only seen it there, we've seen it in numerous examples all over the place. So when we get the rather feeble assurances from those opposite, and the rather curt assurances from the minister, forgive us for thinking that we don't necessarily believe those. That's why we've introduced a private member's bill that does exactly what they say they as a government should be doing with respect to payday lenders.

So they'll have an opportunity, even though they'll hedge and they'll try to squib it and try to avoid the issue, because the National Party, as we know, will keep undermining the proposition and setting up friends of payday lenders groups to lobby the government. We've seen the effectiveness of that in the past. But they will still have an opportunity to do what's right, because we will make them do it. We will give them that option, to actually do what's right and to implement what they know they should be doing—and that is, cutting back the opportunities for predatory lending behaviour in this country.

They know it's a problem. It's a significant problem. And the irony is that it's in National Party seats that it's one of the biggest problems—that's where it's one of the biggest problems. It's a problem across the country, but it's one of the biggest problems in those seats. Some of the seats that have the lowest socioeconomic groupings in this country are National Party seats, and they're where a lot of this problem of predatory lending happens. We see all the time people who have borrowed hundreds of dollars to get themselves out of an immediate problem and then, in a process of multiplying interest rates—incredibly high interest rates—it leads, in some cases, to tens of thousands of dollars due to be paid back, simply for a couple of hundred dollars.

People never get out of that downward spiral, and it's because some of these predators—and I call them 'predators'—feed on the opportunities that they have to exploit people in vulnerable positions. We want to move to regulate that. The government know they ought to be doing it, but the National Party won't let them do it, and the government need to stand up to the National Party. (Time expired)