Brian Burston (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The great divide in Australian politics today is not between left and right but between the elite ruling class and ordinary people. For decades we have trusted the elites to look after the difficult job of running the country, believing that they had the best interests of the country at heart. That trust is evaporating now, and the selfish and absurdly generous handouts that politicians have given to themselves is a part of the reason why. People can see now that the elites are ruling for their own benefit and not for the benefit of the country. In my first speech I spoke about how the political class was hostile, contemptuous and disconnected from ordinary Australians, and what is clear today is that ordinary Australians are saying 'enough is enough'. Prime Minister Turnbull can see his support evaporating, and the Parliamentary Entitlements Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 is a desperate attempt to prevent that, but it is too little, too late. It is too little because Prime Minister Turnbull takes care to preserve his own cushy post-retirement benefits even while he strips them away from his colleagues, and too late because the public sees right through this sudden road-to-Damascus conversion. No-one believes that all these politicians, who have occupied this place for decades and grown fat on their special privileges, have only just discovered that there is waste and abuse of entitlements.

They are like the police chief in the film Casablanca'shocked, shocked' to realise that the public is getting ripped off. They say they are fixing the system, but the system was never broken; it operates exactly how it was intended to. The exploitation of the entitlements system is not a bug; it is a feature. Many of the politicians in the major parties talk about the sacrifice they make to serve the public. Yes, politicians work long hours and often have to spend time away from family; so do truckies. But truckies do not get quarter-million-dollar salaries, truckies do not get their own extra-generous superannuation entitlements and truckies do not get to change the nation's laws to suit themselves and their mates.

You want to see someone making a sacrifice for the public good? Go talk to the people paying your salary with their tax dollars. The Australian people have had a gutful. They are not going to be satisfied just with ending free post-retirement travel for MPs; they want to see the whole putrid swamp drained. That means no more taking the family to Uluru, no more taking helicopters to party meetings and no more supposedly independent remuneration tribunal findings that just so happen to find you all deserve $50,000 pay rises. The Australian public will not be satisfied until their politicians get the same deal as everyone else: they get paid for the job they do, while they are doing it—nothing more and nothing less.

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