Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) | Hansard source

It's been a day of highs and lows, I have to say. And it's very good to have the last remaining two and a bit minutes to reflect upon this debate, which, after some very strong contributions earlier this afternoon, has really had the coalition ending the week with not bang but a whimper. The last hour and a half that I've been in here has been like an open mic session at a Trotskyite funeral. Senator Shoebridge might have been to a few of those Trotskyite funerals. Maybe no others of us have, but it was very reminiscent of that.

It is good to see some members of the coalition following Senator McGrath's injunction to be early adopters of AI, because it's hard to understand some of the contributions without that. What we've seen from the coalition this afternoon is the anti anti-money-laundering proposition. The people who this piece of legislation will hurt are bikies, drug traffickers, arms smugglers, terrorists, sex traffickers, dark web crypto criminals, funders of Russian and North Korean bot factories. Who does money laundering hurt in the end? It hurts ordinary Australians. It hurts small businesses. It hurts families. The extravagant claims that have been made by the coalition in this place about the impact of regulation in this area cannot be believed.

But I just say this. The idea put forward by Senator Sharma—who was auditioning for a new role this afternoon, after we heard the unhappy news of Senator Birmingham's retirement—that a grey listing for Australia's economy would somehow be a preferential outcome than dealing with money laundering is an utterly scandalous position. It shows how reckless and arrogant Peter Dutton's coalition really is. The consequences of— (Time expired)