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

Senator Cormann, it is your MPs saying this. Have you read those comments? By your assertion, Senator Cormann, have senior journalists in the pieces they have been writing in the past week been making it up when they quote government sources? These are not second-rate press gallery journalists; these are the most senior journalists in the country. I am not the biggest fan of every journalist in this place—none of us is—but many of them are the most respected journalists in the country and they are all saying the same thing. They are all saying and writing that they are getting this from government sources. Senator Cormann may dispute that, but I believe—and I have no reason not to believe—that they are telling the truth and they are getting information straight from government sources. I worry that a government that is prepared to gloat in the way it is—it is bragging about what it is doing—intends to use this for a double dissolution election. It will be bad for politics if the rules have been set in such a way as to give them the outcome they want. (Time expired)