Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

In the last six weeks also we have passed laws to ban the practices of the Leader of the Opposition when he was running the AWU—all of the unaccountable, shifty conduct he used to get on with; taking money from big companies in order to trade away workers' penalty rates. That's what the opposition leader did when he was running the AWU. What about giving money to himself? He talks about conflicts of interest. This is a union leader who, with union members' hard-earned funds, spent $25,000 on himself. He paid it to himself, to his own campaign. Even worse in many respects, he took $32,000 from a building company with which he was negotiating an enterprise agreement. He didn't tell the members about that—oh no. No, no. I tell you what, Mr Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition, when he was running the AWU, always had his members on a need-to-know basis, and he thought they didn't need to know anything. He sold some mushroom workers down the river, and he treated all of his members like mushrooms: he kept them in the dark. He told them nothing. So we passed that law, and the Labor Party voted against it. What we've done also is ensure that unions will have to be accountable, as companies are, and transparent.

Under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition, he paid $100,000 to GetUp!—$100,000 to GetUp!. There is no evidence that it was authorised. We would love to see the minute. It would be good to see the minute, but it hasn't been produced—$100,000 to GetUp!. Very relevantly this week, GetUp! only a few months ago started a campaign to rename Australia Day 'Invasion Day'. That's the organisation he was funding and of which he was a board member. GetUp! is prominent in campaigning to destroy Operation Sovereign Borders. GetUp! is the biggest campaigner, joined by many members of the Labor Party, for opening up our borders so that we would once again have thousands of unauthorised arrivals, drownings at sea and kids in detention. This is the shameful record of Labor. The Leader of the Opposition funded a capable political organisation, GetUp!. They've got a big organisation, they get their message out—it is a dangerous Left-green Labor message. They get it out there, and they've been funded to do it by the Leader of the Opposition. He can't walk away from that responsibility.

For the last six weeks, we've been keeping Australians safe, we've been putting downward pressure on electricity prices and we've been growing the economy. Those are the urgent issues. That's what we should be debating. That's why this motion should be denied. (Time expired)

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