Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Actually, they are right, I suppose: they are relying on people being too busy to pay attention while they sneak this sort of dodgy stuff through this place. I watched gobsmacked last year as the Treasurer moved to kneecap litigation funders through rushed and cramped regulations that ASIC spent tens of thousands of dollars on. They had to get legal advice to try to figure out how to implement the Treasurer's hastily made announcement, which occurred only eight days after he had called on this chamber to undertake an investigation. Everything that you look at with this government smells. Dodgy deals are being done behind closed doors. There is so much corruption, so much of a lack of transparency. Like there's some special club—I won't even call it a boys' club because the girls on the other side are in on it as well—we who have money, we who have a high education, we who live in suburbs that separate us from the riffraff of Australia, we will own this agenda, we will manage it and we will just talk to those people at the top of the tree and keep them all on side with us. They don't care about the long-term impacts on ordinary hardworking Australians. It seems to me that this government has learnt nothing from the financial sector royal commission.

Mr Morrison can put on his baseball cap and claim that he's an ordinary suburban dad as much as he likes, but what's really going on is he's much more focused on letting large financial institutions off the hook. What he's interested in, in his baseball cap, is stopping any kind of scrutiny on large companies and on large financial institutions. He can say, and he does say every day in his daggy dad routine, that he's standing up for ordinary Australians, mate, but you just get a little bit behind the door and the street angel is a house devil. A house devil over in the chamber, the green chamber—and he has got a whole lot of friends in the red chamber bringing about his agenda—

Senator Sterle interjecting—

That's true, thank you, Senator Sterle, indeed only the ones who get promoted. Mr Morrison saying he stands up for Australians is about as truthful as his responses to so many questions about his responsibility. We've got a bushfire: mate, he's not holding the hose. We've got a terrible problem in aged care: it's not his responsibility. We've got a COVID pandemic: the states can look after that. You watch him, he's going to be running from the vaccine problems that his government will inflict on this country. We've seen it already. They're days behind. They'll be weeks behind. I want that vaccine out. I want it in my community. Mr Morrison is not to be trusted and he's not to be trusted on the piece of legislation under debate today.