Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's been an amazing thing to see the members of the Labor government be shocked or feign shock that the criminal mafia elements of their own organisation, the union movement, the CFMEU, have been doing bad things. We have discovered, again, this week through extensive media reporting that these criminal mafia elements are inflating building costs by up to 30 per cent. Now in some cases in Queensland you're seeing a 30 per cent premium being applied to new apartment builds in that state where the CFMEU is onsite with all their fake RDOs, fake allowances, dodgy practices, mafia linkages and bikies threatening people and trying to kill people. It's fantastic stuff.

Welcome to Australia 2025 in the Labor Party, where you pretend that you're not friends with criminal mafia elements but, actually, you are. These are the same people who fund your campaigns and give you millions and millions of dollars, and they run a super fund on the side. This is the most extraordinary thing. After punishing the country with a housing policy that builds bugger-all houses or virtually no houses—after wasting billions of dollars on that—and then opening up this five per cent deposit scheme to anyone without any means testing, then we have the 30 per cent apartment tax brought to you by the CFMEU. That is an unbelievable occurrence. It seems to cycle around and around every few months. We see more and more newspaper articles, but nothing ever happens.

I thought these guys were supposed to be in administration. The Prime Minister assured the Australian people that the CFMEU would be out of business. He was going to chase them out of town. But, no, they're back onsite. In New South Wales, they're terrorising people in Newcastle, they're terrorising people in Western Sydney and they're costing people access to the great Australian dream.