Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, that is the fast lane. Business SA also employed Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher. Maybe we should call business SA ‘Liberal Inc’ in future. The member for Mayo has never had a real job in his life. He went from Business SA to work for Rob Lucas—no-one would know him here but he is the leader of the Liberals in the Legislative Council in South Australia. It should be noted that Mr Lucas has also never had a real job in his life. He went from university to Liberal Party HQ and then to the Legislative Council. You cannot find a more sheltered life than that. You cannot find a more sheltered workshop than the Legislative Council of South Australia—a body that should be abolished as soon as possible. That was not enough for the member for Mayo. He progressed into cloud city, into the federal parliament, to work for Kevin Andrews, the former minister for industrial relations, and he finally finished up working in the office of the former Prime Minister. In his biography on his website, the member for Mayo claims to have been ‘the youngest person ever to hold the title of senior adviser’, which is an extraordinary thing to brag about.

Finally, after that you would have thought that the election defeat of the Howard government and the defeat of Work Choices, with which the member for Mayo was so intimately involved, might have brought him back to earth or seen him make sure he went into the private sector and make a million dollars in business or something like that. But, no, what happened was that the conservative machine in South Australia shoehorned him into a vacancy deliberately created by Mr Downer. The conservative machine shoehorned him into Mayo over the wishes of local candidates in a preselection that Liberal stalwart Bob Day, the former Liberal candidate for Makin, rightly observed was designed just to benefit one candidate, Mr Briggs. So he went from university to Business SA to a ministerial office and then into Mayo. One can conclude that the member for Mayo has never worked a day in his life outside his work for the Liberal Party and outside his work in professional politics. If anybody has been so part of a political machine, if anybody has had the benefit of some self-serving political machine, it is the member for Mayo. His attacks, in his speech on this bill, on the member for Adelaide, the member for Kingston, Tom Koutsantonis, Senator Farrell, and Peter and Rob Malinauskas are just rank hypocrisy. They are insincere and driven by a rather divisive partisanship. His contribution sought to invent this powerful Labor machine as some mechanism to explain away the South Australian Liberals’ inability to establish support in the community.

We know they lose elections because of unpopular policies like Work Choices and their rampant and divisive internal factionalism. Mr Briggs is involved in both those things. My advice to him is this: give up your myopic focus on the South Australian Labor Party, give up your myopic focus on trying to invent this fantastic Labor machine which supposedly exists out there, get out into the real world and try to do a real job and get in touch with reality and you might find that Work Choices is not so popular, nor are partisan and unnecessary attacks on your opponents. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate (on motion by Ms Grierson) adjourned.

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