Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026

Mr TIM WILSON (Goldstein) (12:17): One of the things that Australians always held their head high about was that we were supposed to be a nation free of corruption. We were supposed to be a nation where good, honest, decent people got themselves into positions of public office, and where, when there was corruption, people of good, decent, honest reputation called it out.

The problem we now have is that the government has become the enabler of corruption. This is a systemic problem now across not just the federal government but the state governments as well. Every day this is being revealed across the country, whether it's the Wood inquiry in Queensland or in media reports in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia or South Australia.

It is explicitly clear that government projects are being commissioned where the CFMEU, in concert with the government, is ensuring brown paper bags of public money are being transferred to the few, for their benefit, and these are being paid for by the Australian worker. This is the problem. The cartel kickbacks that are going through and are funded by your Australian taxes are now part of the systemic nature of the increased costs of Australian projects funded through the industrial relations system.

You are not just paying for it through higher taxes and debt into the future but increasingly paying it through higher costs for projects across the country and, of course, through lower returns and lower values. This is the disaster of the Albanese government, the Allan government and so many other governments across the country. The only state in this nation that's been prepared to call it out has been the LNP government in Queensland, where they've commissioned an inquiry, the Wood inquiry, that's directly called out the cartel kickbacks that have existed in the CFMEU.

In doing so, they've directly exposed what is now happening. Millions of dollars are being funnelled through the facilitation arrangements established through the industrial relations system enabled by the Labor Party. They are making sure the money makes its way into organised crime and the trade union movement so it can then, of course, be kicked into the ALP campaign coffers.

That's being paid for by average Australians. This is the most disgraceful episode in this nation's history, and I note the silence on the government benches right now. They know that, if they stand up and protest, they protest too much, because they know how much they're complicit in this crime.

It is time to stand up and it's time to call it out. Every time they sit there in silence and do nothing, they continue to be complicit. Last night in the Senate—only last night—three states, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, reported to government their concerns about corruption and cartel kickbacks across three projects in their states.

We've made a simple request of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government to do an audit to make sure that public money is not going towards cartel kickbacks and brown paper bags or into the CFMEU and organised crime, and they're refusing. The simple question is: is public money going to finance organised crime?

It should be an easy answer, but the minister refuses to look, and there's a simple reason why. It's because she knows that, if she shuts down the cartel kickback supply chain, at some point it'll stop feeding people within the Labor Party ecosystem and the cartel they have operating. Of course, we see this consistently across the industrial relations system, whether it's with the industry super funds that use marketing expenses to shower money onto the trade union movement, which miraculously makes significant financial contributions to the Labor Party so they can stay in office and they can keep taking money out of Australian workers' wages and showering it upon themselves; whether it's with the trade union movement so that they can campaign for Labor to be in a position to change the laws to favour them at the expense of ordinary Australians; or whether it's making sure that they suppress wages for Australians so that they can take advantage and strongarm them and use their muscle.

Wherever it is, the only people who are winning are the Australian Labor Party, because the industrial relations system in Australia today is not about empowering workers. The industrial relations system in Australia today is about control. It's about controlling Australian people and Australian workers and making sure that they do the Labor Party's bidding.

This is the immoral nature of this government. They simply do not have the best interests of Australians at heart and they are not interested in how they're going to empower them to be part of the future success of this country. So my simple question to the minister, though she hasn't bothered to turn up, is: when are you going to stop the kickbacks, when are you going to start to focus on the Australian people, and when are you going to stop the money flows to organised crime?