Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have heard some hypocrisy coming from the other side through my 6½ years in parliament, but to hear the member for, of all places, Port Adelaide stand at the despatch box and cry about the effect of increasing power prices on consumers just takes the cake. Member for Port Adelaide, go and give yourself a gold medal for your performance at the despatch box crying about power prices. Under those 'most magnificent glory years' of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd regimes, of which the member for Port Adelaide was a senior member, power prices increased in this nation 118 per cent. And do you know where they bit the most? It was in the member for Port Adelaide's electorate. If you look at the statistics, you see that, over the last several years under the Labor Party, nowhere have households had their power cut off more than in South Australia. And the member for Port Adelaide comes in here and talks about how upset he is about power price increases. Member for Port Adelaide, go and give yourself a gold medal for hypocrisy, because that is the best that I have ever seen.

Getting back to the MPI, I actually read it and I was a bit confused. The MPI from the Leader of the Opposition says, 'The harm that will be inflicted on Australians.' So I thought, 'Is this an extension of the threats made by the CFMEU?' They are the ones who talk about harm to Australians. Actually, let's just see what the CFMEU have said about doing harm to Australians—and I quote:

Let me give a dire warning to the ABCC inspectors: be careful what you do.

When we come after you, you'd better be careful.

We're going to expose them all. We will lobby their neighbourhoods. We will tell them who lives in their house …We'll go to their local footy club, we'll go to their local shopping centre. They will not be able to show their faces anywhere. Their kids will be ashamed of them, who their parents are, while we expose these ABCC inspectors.

Threatening children. This is the type of rhetoric that you would expect from a criminal outlaw motorcycle gang. Yet these are the major benefactors of the Labor Party. Millions of dollars from the CFMEU underwrite the elections and the campaigns of the members sitting over that side. When we raise this issue, their heads go down and silence comes across them, because in their hearts they are embarrassed to receive funding from an organisation that makes such criminal threats.

The late great Bill Leak, in one of his cartoons, summed up the relationship between the CFMEU and the opposition. His cartoon showed a CFMEU official with a CFMEU t-shirt on, with the tatts and the muscles, holding up a sock puppet, and that sock puppet of course was the Leader of the Opposition. We know who pulls the strings. We know what would happen should that Labor Party ever sit on this side of the chamber. They would merely be puppets of the CFMEU. And I think that is something all Australians should consider. All Australians should consider what this country would be like if an organisation like the CFMEU was running the show, because that is what would happen should the Labor Party ever sit on this side—hypocrisy, threats; that is the modern day Labor Party.

The other hypocrisy we have heard from them is that this MPI, which should have been an uplift and a chance to talk about the progress our nation is making—instead, we see this appalling motion to end this session of parliament. Simply hypocrisy for the Labor Party to come in here and complain about cutting penalty rates when no-one has cut more penalty rates than their trade union bosses, when no-one has done more to increase electricity prices than the Labor Party and when no-one has done more to run up debt and harm the citizens of this nation. We are working to improve this nation. We must keep these people away from this side of the chamber.

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