Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science) Share this | Hansard source

The MPI, I should say. Thank you, Shadow Treasurer. I note that for 23 years in Western Sydney, I was in hotels across Western Sydney and dealt with guns, dealt with bikies and dealt with drugs.

Opposition members interjecting—

Laugh, laugh, those opposite! It is not fun. A 21 years of age, I kicked in my first toilet door to pull a 21-year-old young bloke with a needle in his arm out and attempted to revive him. I failed. I have seen the scourge of drugs in real life on the front lines. It was one of the key motivations when, five years ago, I joined the Liberal Party. In the last term of that Labor government, they used the AFP as something they could continually cut funding and resources from. You had that crazy situation.

The Leader of the Opposition runs out of the chamber! The irony of this week is that the Leader of the Opposition is using guns to hide behind. For six years, he had every chance to stand up. The member for Blaxland was the minister responsible. I felt sorry for him, because in Regents Park, where my family owned the Regents Park Hotel, was the biggest ever stash of methamphetamines. It was in his electorate whilst he was the minister. Why? Because under them, the resources cut to the AFP were at record levels.

They were under 10 per cent of containers coming to this country—which contained all of our mail, by the way—that were checked. You heard the Prime Minister stand up in this place earlier in the week and talk about the member for Cook and the 220 Glocks that were found in a post-office box in his electorate. The safest way that organised criminals had under the Labor Party to get guns into this country was the genius idea of mailing the guns to themselves. The Glocks got through. Those opposite go quiet now. The irony—dysfunction, thy name is Labor—of them putting the word dysfunction in this MPI. For six years, there was pink batts, school halls, cash for clunkers, the carbon tax and the mining tax, which is my personal favourite. It did not raise a cent, but locked in $16 billion in expenditure. They are all politics and no substance.

The irony is that the comedian, the Leader of the Opposition, stands up here for 10 minutes and keeps his backbench entertained. The people of Australia are over this crap. They are over it. Those opposite think all this resonates here in the beltway, but I have news for them: the people want to feel safe. The Minister for Justice, since coming to the role in 2013, along with this government, have them feeling safer than ever. When the games were going on last week, I waited in my seat at question time for the Manager of Opposition Business to ask one question of the minister about a 16-year-old boy and a colleague who were pulled up minutes away from an act of terror in his own electorate—but not one question. You are all politics on that side and no substance. We are getting on with government.

If all this is in government it is one thing, but now we are seeing it in opposition. I do not mind them trying to take the focus off what is really going on—the internal power struggles of the Labor Party—but it is going on this week again. You put Kim Carr in, you take Kim Carr out; you put Kim Carr in—you are going to need some help to do the next part—and you shake him all about. When you do that, we find that a split in the Left emerges. Does anyone know who Gavin Marshall is? I have to read his name because I don't know who he is. You could not pick him in a line-up. Who is he? Instead of where's Wally, we should have where's Gavin Marshall. But he found his voice this week, and poor old Gilesy, Andrew Giles, and Catherine King, they are gone.

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