David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Acting Deputy President. They don't care that the rhetoric they put here is totally contrary to the law and to the Constitution. As I said before, I give them credit: they know it's wrong. They know what they're saying is wrong, but they don't care, because for them a really good conspiracy doesn't have to be grounded in the truth.

I was counting the number of conspiracy theories that Senator Rennick had—it's one of the challenges in trying to follow the senator's contributions—and I got up to six. Somehow superannuation was in it. Somehow the Button plan was in it. Bill Gates, of course, featured at some point. The UN was in on it. Somehow or other universities were in on it. Former Minister Dawkins was in on it. I was trying to work out how to weave all the conspiracies together into some coherent whole. That way danger lies, I think—trying to pretend that they think that there's some sort of coherence in it. They just throw out all these individual elements. They throw out all these individual conspiracies and hope that one of them will stick in someone's mind. Maybe it was the UN. Maybe it is superannuation. Maybe it all comes down to the Button plan. Maybe it's the WHO. Maybe it's Bill Gates. Maybe it's banks in general. Maybe it's something that happened in Ottawa in 1917. I don't know. But it is never grounded in any kind of coherence or facts. To do that is the worst abuse of the position of an elected representative.