Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The actual point, Senator Wong, is that the motion you have moved alleges a conflict of interest against Senator Nash because of where the wife of her chief of staff works and a shareholding that is in the process of being removed from that small business. None of you opposite has any experience of that, other than what you have done to Australia's manufacturing industry, and you have the gall to allege that. Yet you openly hand over millions of dollars to your organisation and you brag that you are the political wing of the labour movement. These are affiliated Labor Party bodies; these are bodies that write cheques to the Labor Party; these are bodies that have to declare political expenditure in favour of the Labor Party—although with some of them I will accept that they occasionally donate to the Greens. No-one takes your allegations seriously, and when the royal commission gets underway we are going to find out even more about your connections with dodgy union practices, especially in my home state of Victoria.