Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

not like you lot over there. You only have to look at some of the rorts that go on. There is Platinum Forum, registered in Victoria. They received over $1 million, but no donations over $12,800 were declared. Where is the money? Who is providing this $1 million? We know who it is; it is the white-shoe brigade. It is those people that want a bigger GST imposed on ordinary Australians. It is those people that want access to tax rip-offs at the expense of ordinary working people. That is who is providing this money. Then there is a mob called Parakeelia Pty Ltd. They received $932,000, but only declared receipts of $43,000 to the ATO. Where did that money come from?

How dare the Liberal and National parties talk about the trade union movement—good, honest workers—providing support to the ALP? How dare you criticise those donations when you have all these secret slush funds all over the country, and money getting handed over in the front seat of a Bentley up in Newcastle? What an outrageous mob you are.

There are more: the Liberal club in Western Australia received $830,000, but there was only $48,000 in declared donations; and the Kooyong 200 Club, $444,720 in donations and only $50,000 disclosed. It goes on and on. There are pages and pages and pages of this stuff.

There are all these little trust funds and rorts getting set up all over the country by the Liberal Party—set up all over the country by these people. Yet they have the gall and the hide to say that ordinary Australians, decent Australians, who are members of trade unions and want to support the Labor Party are doing something wrong. What a bloody joke. What an absolute joke from you mob, when you have all these rorts going on.

And the Greens should have stood up against these rorts. The Greens should have been saying, 'We can fix this because we've got a negotiating position here. We can not only negotiate something decent for electoral reform but get funding reform as well.' But they were too short sighted, they were too weak. They just were not capable of taking that on in the long term.