Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It's time to stop the rorts. Yesterday it was revealed that the Ambassador for Gender Equality had spent $335,000 in the last two years flying around the world. On top of that, we'd just seen the week before the Ambassador for Climate Change fly to Baku to give a presentation where there were about five people in the room. She did a welcome to country in another country. Why you do a welcome to country when you're in another country is beyond me. How many more ambassadors do we have out there wasting taxpayer dollars, flying around the world and virtue signalling instead of spending that money here to provide essential services to the Australian people, who are struggling under a cost-of-living crisis?

I note last week that the Treasurer has come out and said that he's going to extend the time in which they're going to continue to grow the Future Fund or not draw down on that Future Fund. The Future Fund is actually misnamed. It's an Orwellian term. It's not a future fund; it's a slush fund for retired bureaucrats in Canberra. The idea that this is some sort of sovereign wealth fund needs to stop because the funds from that fund or the proceeds from that fund go to retired bureaucrats. They're not going to all Australians. Yes, all Australians are contributing through their hard-earned taxes to this particular fund, but the fund is only going to be applied to about 130,000 retired bureaucrats.

Originally, that was going to start being drawn down in the 2020s—that is, now—but it is continually being pushed out at a massive cost in administration fees to maintain this. Why don't we pay down the future fund by paying out the defined benefits, provided those defined benefits are means-tested, and get on with the business of delivering services to the Australian people?