ADJOURNMENT

Mr SMALL (Forrest—Opposition Whip) (19:50): Australians opening the Sydney Morning Herald this morning were confronted with a truly alarming front-page story. Apparently, crime only happens in Labor seats these days. According to the Albanese government, the $20 million Strengthening Communities Program was supposed to 'strengthen community safety by deterring criminal activities and providing real-time surveillance and evidence for law enforcement'.

I think we'd all agree it's a worthwhile goal. But today's reporting raises very serious questions. Was this program designed to install CCTV cameras across our country or pork barrel Labor held seats?

Of the 20 projects in the program, some 17 were in seats already held by Labor before the 2025 election, and much of the remaining funding went to—you guess it, Mr Speaker!—seats that were in Labor's crosshairs. There was $1½ million for projects in Dickson and Petrie, coalition held before the election, whilst another $600,000 went straight into projects in Deakin and Menzies.

Under the Strengthening Communities Program, 93 per cent of funding has gone to seats held today by the Labor government. It's clear that this government thinks that crimes are only committed in seats that Labor holds or in seats that Labor thinks it can win. It would all be comical if it wasn't $20 million of your taxpayer money.

Nothing about this program passes the pub test. If it was genuinely about community safety, grants would be awarded based on need across our community, not based on the seats which Labor wants to win. I've got a newsflash for the Prime Minister: criminals don't check which seat they're in before they rob people.

We know this government has some form when it comes to these types of programs, despite what it used to say in opposition. The Supporting Multicultural Communities Program saw around 85 per cent of funding directed to—you guessed it!—Labor held seats, taking hard-earned money off hardworking Australians and using that money to fund the ghettoisation of Australia, as I said to the Sydney Morning Herald some weeks ago.

Then, of course, what has garnered some serious attention across the country now is the $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program—for which the Greens are now on the bandwagon—after revelations that almost 90 per cent of funding flowed to Labor held seats. The Centre for Public Integrity went through the program, and its chair said: Prima facie, it looks like the misuse of public money or serious pork-barrelling, as it's sometimes called— which is a rather extraordinary assessment.

On top of that, it was recently revealed that $6 million was awarded to the Marrickville golf club, in the Prime Minister's own electorate of Grayndler. This is the club the Prime Minister has had a decade's long association with, the club that listed him as an honorary member. It is, of course, the subject of some serious debate across the country, because, miraculously, the Marrickville golf club was the only golf club in the entire country to receive funding under this program.

It is extraordinary, but perhaps more extraordinary still is Labor's hypocrisy. In 2020, when an undeclared honorary membership was connected to a grant of $36,000, the Prime Minister called it 'red hot' and demanded that the minister resign because it failed the pub test and it failed every test. Well, Prime Minister, if $36,000 was red hot, what do you call $6 million, or some 170-odd times more, taxpayer money?

But the hypocrisy doesn't end with the Prime Minister. The infrastructure minister, Catherine King, who I've crowned the new queen of pork-barrelling, has spent years condemning exactly this sort of behaviour. In 2020, she called coalition grants programs—or delivering election commitments, as the member for Bruce would like to call it—'industrial scale pork-barrelling' and 'rorting on a nuclear scale'.

But wait for my personal favourite. In 2023, the minister posted on X that there'd be no more colour coded spreadsheets and no more pork-barrelling. Well, it turns out under this government the colour coded spreadsheets are just all red, because the pork-barrelling practices on the government benches are alive and well.

(Time expired) Mr Hill interjecting— The SPEAKER: Order, the member for Bruce!