Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I doorknock all the time and I talk to people, but, you see, I am actually elected by the people of Moreton to represent them and work with them. The difficulty, though, is that the trade union leadership in Melbourne have decided to allot a campaign team to coordinate, in a cynical way, a number of things. They want to identify people who live in target seats—that is step No. 1. They want to identify undecided voters—actually drilling down, finding out how people voted and how they feel about things. There is not much push-polling going on there! Of course, they want to make sure that, once they have identified those people, they follow up with potential activists and target certain seat campaign supporters. Of course, we know how the Labor Party are good at targeting people and we certainly know how the union movement have targeted small businesses in the past. What was the line some years ago: the only small business the union movement has ever opened is with a sledgehammer? Step 4 is to register the members who have not enrolled to vote. There was the sleazy view that, because the government has worked to ensure the integrity of the electoral process, with changes which began in April, the Labor Party, the unions, saw an opportunity to enrol the votes of people who might slip through the not quite capable system that was in place—the system that we, of course, have tried to change to ensure integrity.

Step 5 is to systematically contact undecided voters. I warn people in my electorate that June-July is the period for the next call, and there will be another call in September, and then they will doorknock during the election period. So how will you feel when our friends from the union movement front you at your door, in the middle of dinnertime, saying: ‘Righto, brother, we know how you voted last time. We’ve done the check. We’ve factored it all back to the ACTU and they’ve told us to come and give you a little visit to tell you how to vote.’

I long for a return to the time when advocates for local electorates were chosen from the community, not from some Tammany Hall style politics, which is what the ACTU have re-introduced to Australia. The Labor Party need to stand away and distance themselves from this style of political thuggery, because Australians do not want the union movement back into their lives, as Rod Cameron said the other week. Labor ignored him. He is just another pollster, just another voice in the wilderness. I’ll stand on the side of people in my electorate to make their own choices. (Time expired)

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