Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I always say with those ridiculous points of order, the Labor Party will try that bullying on me. I can tell you, Senator Polley, it does not work on me. In fact, you had a couple of your union hacks on these polling booths and as they were standing there, lying to people and saying, 'the coalition will sell Medicare,' I went and stood next to them. As they would say that, I would say: 'Please ignore this. That is a complete lie.' The unionists on a couple of occasions then turned round and said to me, 'You're bullying me. You're in my space.' Me bully them! They were about five times my size! But I just told the voters who had been told a lie by these union thugs what the truth was. The unionists said, 'You're in my space.' I said, 'If you don't like it, move somewhere else or go back to Sydney, Brisbane or Hobart, from whence you obviously came.' This was the low point: trying to confuse and frighten vulnerable people into casting a vote on the basis of the most outrageous lie I have ever head in my long time in politics.

Senator Polley interjecting—

For Senator Polley to continue the mistruths about funding by the coalition government for hospitals and health care right around Australia is equally as demeaning.

The GetUp! people are just a front for the Greens political party and the left wing of the Labor Party, and they even acknowledge that themselves now. We have always known GetUp! were a fraud, but they are confirming that themselves now. They were in the electorate of Dawson, which is in the southern part of Townsville, going down through my home town of Ayr and into Mackay. Five or six of them were there trying to run this campaign; they were not very good, I might say, but they were there in numbers. They had this big banner up saying, 'The coalition is going to sell the Mackay hospital'. Now they could not work out that although it was still in the electorate of Dawson, they had these signs about the Mackay hospital talking about a city 400 or 500 kilometres south of Townsville. Quite frankly, Townsville people were really not convinced on the way they voted because someone was talking about a hospital 400 or 500 kilometres away! But that was the standard of the sort of person that GetUp! were paying or had convinced to go and try and get rid of Mr Christensen in the electorate of Dawson. Mr Christensen increased his vote in spite of a most vicious campaign against him by the unions and GetUp!—they both set upon him. So perhaps the Labor Party will learn in the future that they should look at their resources more.

On that, I might add that the CFMEU and the MUA, I was told, sent up workers to hand out how-to-vote cards for the Glenn Lazarus Team. Remember Senator Lazarus, who was here for a short period of time? Undistinguished time, I might say. He had all these unionists up there handing out his how-to-vote cards. I think he got about one per cent of the vote. Again, I understand there are repercussions within the Labor Party for the MUA and the CFMEU putting resources into Mr Lazarus's campaign rather than the Labor one—although, of course, Lazarus's preferences all went directly to the Labor Party, as you would expect if you had seen the way then Senator Lazarus voted in this chamber.

So while this report is a majority report, you can understand where it is coming from. I think the minority report is by far the better indication of what happened in that committee.