Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

You know about collecting your public funding over the years. Let me start here: 2007. The Australian Labor Party's public funding—this is taxpayer funded dollars—was $22 million. The Liberal Party had $18 million and the Australian Greens had $4 million. Then we can go to 2010. Again, the Australian Labor Party got nearly $21 million, the Liberal Party got nearly $21 million and the Greens got $7 million. In 2013 the Liberal Party got almost $24 million, the Labor Party got almost $21 million and the Australian Greens got $5½ million. And in the last election, 2015-16, the Liberal Party got $24 million, the Labor Party got $23 million and the Australian Greens got nearly $7 million. This is all about the electoral funding—the whole bill is.

The bill states that you are to put in the receipts to get the funding back. In Queensland, that's how the election is run. In Queensland and in Western Australia you actually have to put in the receipts to receive the funding back. That's what should happen. Or, possibly—another case in point is that the donations a political party gets should be taken off the amount of electoral funding that it's entitled to get back through the taxpayer. So you can't have your cake and eat it too. You shouldn't be getting these donations from big corporations and the unions.

There are hardworking Australians who pay their dollars to the unions—$14 or up to $20 a week that they're paying. They're struggling to pay their bills—their electricity bills, keeping food on the table for the kids and all the other expenses—but, no, they pay their union fees. Those go, in turn, to get these union bosses elected to the parliament here. Then they turn around; they're not worried about Australian jobs, because they're signing international free trade agreements that are giving away jobs overseas—like the 5,000 jobs under the China free trade agreement and the TPP-11 that's just been signed. Also, we can look at the Indonesian free trade agreement and what is under the South Korean free trade agreement.

This is Labor representing those hardworking Australians out there. You take their money to run your campaigns so you can have your jobs in here.