Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I know! He gets about. Numen Khan is also a tech engineer in Germany, a talent recruiter in Amsterdam and a marketing manager in Wisconsin. Mr Safi's website reviews were entirely made up—naughty! Dodgy.

Full credit to the formidable journalist Charlotte Grieve at the Age for both exposing dodgy Zahid Safi's fake business empire and for her tenacious pursuit of journalism's holy grail of the 2025 Bruce campaign—an interview with the Liberal candidate. For 23 days she doggedly pursued Mr Safi, trying to land an interview. For 23 days, Mr Safi dodged and weaved and went into hiding, but predictably, when she finally tracked him down on the big day, he literally ran away. But, fortunately, Charlotte pursued him and had a camera on her phone to record the epic moment. Mr Safi had made it to what he thought was the safety of his car, about to drive away, but—you couldn't script this—in a moment of genius, the Liberal Party official who was minding him physically ordered Mr Safi out of the car. You have to watch the video to really get the full gist of it, as the Liberal Party dude was also inexplicably dressed in shorts, a fedora hat and a colourful shirt like he'd wandered out of a Bavarian beer hall. Anticlimactically, just as Charlotte got him, he refused to answer any questions about his businesses. Instead he gave a very credible impersonation of one of those dolls where you press the button and they repeat the phrase, and he said 'cost of living', 'crime', 'cost of living' and 'crime' until he drove away.

There were further revelations through the campaign later including actual victims of Mr Safi's dodgy NDIS businesses, with multiple referrals now to regulatory authorities for investigations. These are not trivial matters. Numerous laws may have been breached with fake website reviews, false addresses and phone numbers, and other worrying reports that attract serious civil and potential criminal penalties in breach of the NDIS Act, the Corporations Act and the Criminal Code Act, including 'failure to comply with the condition of registration as an NDIS provider or the NDIS code of conduct by failing to act with honesty, integrity and transparency' or 'false or misleading information in registration'. Terms of imprisonment are provided under other acts, such as the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act and the Victorian Crimes Act. The Australian Consumer Law also creates specific offences, including 'making a false or misleading representation relating to the supply of goods and services' such as things like false testimonials on the website.

Further tip-offs about Mr Safi's previous, now deregistered, training businesses allegedly selling fake qualifications have been referred to the appropriate authorities. Even News Limited eventually couldn't stay out of the action and they dipped their toes into the cesspit, exposing Mr Safi for faking his own master's degree at Monash University, which is still featured on his LinkedIn. His excuse to the media was that he'd lost his LinkedIn password. Of course, Mr Safi was a very good fit with his campaign team. His campaign manager, a local Liberal elder affectionately known in their crowd as 'Uncle Andrew McNabb', had to resign as campaign manager due to a slew of misogynistic social media posts using terms I cannot repeat here.

Some of Mr Safi's more charming volunteers really excelled themselves on the polling booths, using multiple different languages to advise Australian Hazaras that Mr Safi was the reincarnation of Abdur Rahman Khan—he was brought back again—and warning voters that voting for me would betray Khan's legacy. Now, for most Australians, that's a rather obscure historical reference. For those not in the know, Abdur Rahman Khan is known for perpetrating the Hazara wars and genocide in Afghanistan in the 1800s. You might be forgiven for thinking that this was just a rogue volunteer, an extremist whose views didn't align with Mr Safi's campaign. But no: as the Guardian reported extensively, in 2021 Mr Safi co-authored an inflammatory anti-Hazara submission to a Senate inquiry. The Taliban has of course pursued and killed and persecuted people of every ethnicity in Afghanistan and continues to do so. But Mr Safi's and his associates' denial of specific atrocities against Hazaras is dishonest and deeply hurtful to those who've lost family and loved ones in countless acts of targeted violence. And the intimidation of Hazara Australians exercising their vote is disgraceful.

After all of this, you'd think that a functional political party would have dumped a candidate like Mr Safi. But nope: they didn't just tolerate him; as the scandals kept unfolding, they were falling over each other to embrace him—Senator Hume; multiple campaign videos, sans cocktails and sundowners; and glowing endorsements from the member for La Trobe, who described him as a 'phenomenal candidate. He was pictured with Liberal heavyweights like the shadow minister for defence and the Leader of the Nationals. The wonderful Senator Henderson blessed him as 'the exceptional candidate for Bruce'. Senator Paterson hailed him as 'an outstanding candidate'. 'A fantastic candidate', said the now Leader of the Opposition, 'fighting hard for the people of Bruce every day'. In her defence, I suppose Mr Safi did fight hard every day—to get away, run away and stay away from all those pesky journalists.

All that said, to be fair, perhaps you could explain away their professed admiration for Mr Safi as just the heat of a campaign: 'stand by your man'. As the old saying goes, 'He may be an idiot, but he's our idiot.' But even that cannot explain the most concerning and perplexing part. Even after the election, even after all the scandals and revelations and referrals to investigation, this mob are still embracing Mr Safi. In the last few weeks, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Treasurer and the shadow minister for immigration have already had meetings with Mr Safi, described up there on social media as 'very productive'. Maybe Mr Safi was teaching them how to create fake profiles and fake positive reviews for the Liberal Party!

This is now a test for the Liberal leadership—to come in here and apologise for their candidate choice, apologise to the people of Bruce and admit that what they are doing is wrong. Now, they should—but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting. Of course, one giant problem for them is that if they did say sorry then they couldn't get away with pretending it was just one bad apple, could they? Their problem is that the whole tree is rotten. Their whole rotten Liberal enterprise needs root-and-branch reform.

A senior journalist did suggest to me that one reason Mr Safi didn't get the attention nationally in the media that he deserved and wasn't dumped was in part because they had so many appalling candidates that there just wasn't the bandwidth in the media to pay attention to all of them! Let's not forget the Liberal candidate for Wills, who pled guilty last year to obtaining financial advantage by deception, and the Liberal candidate for Whitlam, who said we need to 'fix the military' by removing women from combat and that the ADF had been weakened by diversity and equity quotas and all those woke Marxist ideologies. So they sacked him. But get this: their replacement candidate for Whitlam was just as bonkers as his predecessor. His big agenda was gender fluidity and other forms of Marxist brainwashing in schools. The Liberal candidate for Bradfield, who's still off at the High Court now, was named in a $650,000 settlement over discrimination and harassment claims brought by a former staffer.

This is my personal favourite, though: the Liberal candidate for Kooyong, who thought she'd relate to everyday Australians by describing herself as a renter. The only problem was, she forgot to mention her giant trust fund and investment properties in Canberra and London worth millions of dollars. Twitter was possibly just a little unkind, with the pony club and nepo baby monikers—possibly. Perhaps she just misspelled 'rentier'! Then there's the candidate for Leichhardt, who described my home state of Victoria as a fascist state and bemoaned the 'feminists who helped kick Trump out'—whatever that meant.

Not content with that offering, though, the Liberal Party has now launched its latest civil war over there about gender quotas—you know: whether it's maybe time to ensure that half the population is properly represented in the parliament. Apparently it's okay to have quotas for National Party blokes and seemingly for dodgy candidates but not for women.

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