Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) | Hansard source

I've recently been spending a lot of time thinking about what moral government is and what type of government seeks to divide citizens, feed corruption and break trust within the community. The short and sharp of it is that it's an immoral government. I want to make this clear: it is now a moral imperative to remove the most immoral government in Australia's history, the Albanese government. I don't say this lightly. Right from the moment it was first elected, it sought to divide Australians. It sought to have a referendum based on the social solidarity of our most marginalised population. I fully respect the fact that it had a right to do that by putting the voice to the Australian people. What's immoral about their choice is that they knew it would fail. The idea that you would put the social solidarity of the most marginalised section of our community on a ballot paper knowing it would fail is an abrogation of leadership and responsibility and something I do not think this prime minister will ever be able to shake. He took not just social solidarity but reconciliation, to bring our nation united, to move forward together, and made sure it would fail.

Even in the days leading up to that referendum, there was the complete failure of moral leadership we saw as the events of 7 October 2023 unfolded. On 8 October 2023, we had protesters saying despicable and horrific things on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. This was a moment where we needed leaders to stand up and call out antisemitism and speak to the type of character and country we wanted to be. The silence that we heard from our prime minister and our national leaders every step of the way led to horrific incidents like, on 10 November, the protests at the front of Central Shule in Caulfield South in the Goldstein electorate. It led eventually to the most horrific terrorist incident on our most famous national beach. That is an unforgivable failure of leadership—an immoral failure of leadership—by this government.

But it didn't just end there. What we've seen at every point is that this government has been prepared to eat into the equity of the spiritual nature of our country, eat into the character of who we are, for their own political survival. You just need to look at what they did in the lead-up to the last election. I know the Labor Party is used to branch stacking to be able to achieve an outcome they seek. But to engage in citizenship stacking, where they deliberately went around and targeted electorates and got people to become Australian citizens on the eve of a national poll, is absolutely disgraceful. Not only that; we've seen that the minister has brought in people from overseas conflict zones and bypassed identity, health and security assessments as part of the pathway to bring them into Australia, without any proper measure of who people are, whether they are unsafe for the Australian community and whether they pose a threat to the rest of us. This is not a debate about the individuals; it's a debate about government policy. It was an immoral act by this government.

Now, we see even more immoral leadership as the Prime Minister and his ministers refuse to audit whether federal money has found its way into the hands of organised crime through the CFMEU Labor cartel. The reality is that we have public money finding its way into the hands of organised crime and with complete disinterest from this government. Even worse, we saw the Prime Minister say 50 times over before the last election that he wouldn't introduce a suite of taxes that he then went on to introduce once he had secured his victory. A moral government is one that builds trust, works with the community and seeks to achieve an outcome to improve the whole of the nation. We presently have an immoral government that is focused on how it divides the Australian community and leaves us in a weaker position to save their own electoral bacon.

There is hope. We can have a moral government again that's focused on uniting Australians and building trust and taking Australia forward together. But the only way we can do that is by seeing a change of government and the end of the Albanese government. Whether it is dividing Australians on the basis of race—and we need to acknowledge that this prime minister has overseen the greatest spike of racism in Australia's history—or whether it is stacking the electoral roll, bringing people into Australia without security assessments, facilitating corruption from the CFMEU or breaking promises on the budget, this government has broken its promise to the Australian people.

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