Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Shorten was. I do not know that; I take your word, Senator Cormann. I am pretty certain he would have been. I wonder how much he got paid in a top-end-of-town job as a director of a very big insurance company.

Senator Conroy interjecting—

Senator Conroy, you can tell me whether he did the right thing and put his director's fees into whatever union he was representing at the time. I would be interested in that. I think it is relevant to this bill, because since this government has been in power there has been quite a number of pieces of legislation dealing with the superannuation industry and the insurance industry.

In fact, I know all of us, including Labor members, were approached by groups of financial advisors, people who deal in the superannuation industry—honest, God-fearing family men, many of them in small businesses in small country towns like the town where I live—who were offended that the Labor Party were saying they were all crooks. As they brought in this legislation that we are debating now, there was a slur cast on these people, who in many cases I know are pillars of the financial advice industry. They are good people. It was a good industry. They gave good and valuable advice. But the Labor Party, and one can only surmise why, were hell-bent on making the public wary of these small business men and women.

When you see legislation like this, when you see union officials and former senators sitting in the big end of town around the boardroom table getting big director's fees for their involvement in union super funds, you can only wonder about the rash of legislation before us.

I did want to start my contribution by laughing at Senator Thistlewaite's congratulations for Mr Shorten on this bill.

Anything funnier I do not think I have heard, though someone said Julia was honest and I found that pretty funny.