Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of answers given by Senator Cormann during question time today—and what a day it has been! With apologies to President Obama, today we have seen the government in the Senate acting with the audacity of hope. Over the past few hours we have witnessed the government's audacity in trying to ram through the repeal of the carbon tax legislation without debate. During question time, we finally got to hear the Minister for Finance, Senator Cormann—the still acting Assistant Treasurer—admit that the government has audaciously introduced changes to Labor's Future of Financial Advice reforms to remove basic consumer protections, in the dead of the night, at the eleventh hour, in an audacious attempt to subvert the parliamentary process and avoid the scrutiny of the Senate. There has been an attempt to ram through changes making it easier for the likes of Storm, Trio, Timbercorp, Great Southern and—as we heard again just 10 days ago—the Commonwealth Bank's shonky financial planning arm to rip off ordinary Australians. The government has the audacity to hope that they are going to get away with it. On 30 June, hours before their own 1 July deadline, they promised the big banks, AMP and a handful of dodgy financial planners that give the good financial planners a bad name, that they would keep their promise to them. While they were prepared to break promises to working Australians—promises about the ABC, promises about Medicare and promises about SBS—they insisted that they needed to keep a promise to the big banks and to a handful of dodgy financial planners and audaciously introduced these changes by regulation, without the confidence or the guts to bring proper legislation into this place.

In today's Financial Review,Phil Coorey asked Mr Clive Palmer, the member for Fairfax, what he thought about Mr Cormann's audacious act. For the benefit of those opposite, I will quote the response the member for Fairfax gave Mr Coorey. The member for Fairfax said:

They can stick it up their arse—and you can quote me on that.

How can you have advisers not acting in people's best interests?