Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) | Hansard source

Every day, we hear that Labor has zero tolerance for corruption, yet it continues to happen under their watch. We continue to hand over Australians' hard earned money, corruption continues, and the Prime Minister and Labor simply shrug. The latest revelations about Victoria's Big Build expose a culture that should be an alarm, a wake-up call, to every single Australian. The headline from the Age said it all; it said, 'Don't pay Gatto, don't get access.'

Now, these are not payments that happened before Labor was elected. They are payments that happened this year, as recently as this year—the same year in which the CFMEU is apparently under administration, the same year that Labor committed billions of dollars more to Victoria's corrupt big-build program. Even more chilling was the use of a phrase by those involved: 'Everybody eats.' What does that mean? What that means is that corruption isn't isolated. It means that everybody expects a cut while taxpayers foot the bill.

And, if this isn't bad enough, both state and federal Labor governments knew this was happening. Think about that. The Albanese government knew of at least four corruption allegations about the Suburban Rail Loop in Victoria before it handed over another $3.8 billion of taxpayer money. Now we learn that access to government funded projects in Victoria depended entirely not on merit but on who you knew and who you paid—specifically, whether you knew and paid Mick Gatto.

The Allan Labor government has turned a blind eye to this, and it's still turning a blind eye. The Prime Minister says he's sought assurances, but what's he doing to stop it? Australians deserve answers, and they deserve accountability. They deserve confidence that taxpayer funded dollars are building infrastructure, not feeding a culture where— (Time expired)