Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the Australian public rightly deserve better than this. We have seen collapse after collapse. We have seen Australians lose their homes. I spent the morning talking to one victim from Timbercorp who said that there were 300 people in the same situation that she was in. Yet here we have a government who have done everything they can at every point in time, wherever available, to make sure that they represent the interests and protect that handful of dodgy financial planners. Frankly, I believe the Australian people deserve be I believe there are voices out there—tens of thousands of voices—of people who have suffered from dodgy and bad financial advice. And, no, they are not going to be paying $1,500 and $2½ thousand to buy tickets at fundraisers, but there are thousands and tens of thousands of Australians who deserve to be able to rely on the financial advice that they are given, and what we have seen today is the government sell them out. Why? Because this is a government that, firstly, no longer has control over its own agenda. It is a government that has lost control of its ability to make policy and to determine what happens on a daily basis.

Government is now decided and determined based on what Mr Palmer decides to put in the paper the day before. That is how government is being done and how decisions in this place are now being made. Minister Cormann likes to go on about the Labor-Greens coalition. Let us be clear about this: this is now a Liberal-National-PUP coalition that is making these decisions.

The tragedy is: there is going to be another financial collapse; there is going to be another large scandal. We here today had the ability to take, we could have taken, whatever steps were necessary to prevent that from happening again. Instead, to protect their own interests and to protect the interests of a handful of people, this government has decided to sell out.

I say to the government: Australia deserves better. We deserve better than these kinds of deals. We deserve honesty. We deserve transparency. We deserve a proper legislative process where these things could be debated. You do not have a single consumer advocate group—not one single consumer advocate group in this entire country—supporting the measures that are being taken. I will tell you who does support the measures: a handful of big banks; a handful of corporate interests; a handful of donors to the Liberal Party. But the everyday working Australians who rely on financial advice are not with you on this, and they will never be with you on this.

I say to my friends from the Palmer United Party: do not let this be a lesson in how you are going to govern. You cannot have government being run by last-minute deals. We cannot have government done that way. While I respect and accept the fact that you will always negotiate the best deal that you feel you can get, the fact that these people will bend over backwards every time you make any demand, the fact that you now have the ability to set the entire agenda, and the fact that this country is simply being run by your whims and wishes does not mean that that is a power that should be abused. I believe that in this instance, unfortunately, you are abusing that power. You are taking advantage of the fact that this is a hopeless government that has already completely lost control of its own policy agenda.

There is a better way. There is an open way. There is a transparent way. There is a way in which the thousands and tens of thousands of Australian voices can and should be heard. And I urge this Senate to go back to the drawing board and disallow these regulations. Question put.