Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No Tim Tams for that side of the chamber. Look what you did. The Courier Mail has called Nundah 'the village of the dammed' because the shopfront situation there is so bad. The retail figures under your watch are so appalling that shopfronts cannot prosper there anymore. Just last week Tigerair announced that they would be closing operations in Brisbane. That will mean up to 100 jobs lost. Finally, Jetstar treats its workers so poorly that they have had to strike for eight months to try and get something better than the insecure work they are being offered by the bosses in this economy. That is what it looks like in the real world. That is what your economy does to people out in the real world.

You should be hanging your heads in shame and you should be burying yourselves in your phones, because for 90 minutes every day we have to hear about how you're engraving your medals with what a great job you've done. That is not how it feels to people in the real world. That's only how it feels to people on the 'HMAS Aloha' on that side of the chamber, led and captained by the PM who says that he can do a better job at managing peoples' money than anybody else. During the election he said: 'It's not their money; it's your money. It's not our money; it's your money.' Look what he did with your money—$100 million rorted, $100 million misspent!

What does that look like on the ground? It mean the mums and dads and volunteers and active citizens who gave up hours and hours of their time each week to fill out a grant application in the hope that their 1960s toilets, which are shared by the weightlifters and the soccer kids, might get an upgrade—did they get an upgrade? No, not unless they're in a key Liberal marginal seat, they didn't. Instead, this Prime Minister shovelled $100 million out the door to bolster his own political prospects. Now he has been caught red-handed, and day in, day out we have to listen to the most feeble defence. But it will come undone. You will all come undone by this. We will watch this with some pleasure, because, as we heard today, despite the fact that, clearly, answers are required, the Prime Minister is still only referring to them as 'on rorter' matters.

Despite the fact that the grants were supposed to be given on merit, we are operating in a 'merortocracy' under this government. The Prime Minister, under the Prime Minister's XI, is now 'the rorter boy'. We are all operating under 'Rortership Down', and I hope very much that you do not find yourselves with the same ending as 'On the Rorter Front.'

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