Labor shows it's learnt nothing

Senator Sam Dastyari is the embodiment of one of the biggest reasons why the Labor Party attracted the votes of barely a third of Australians at the last election. A student wheeler-dealer, he worked with Labor lobbyists Hawker Britton (haven't heard much from political mastermind Bruce Hawker lately) before being elected secretary of NSW Labor with the help of right-wing unions, and subsequently being slipped into a vacant Senate slot. The 30-year-old has never faced an election and his senate term has three years to run. Proving you can take a boy out of Sussex Street but you can't take Sussex Street out of a boy, the wet-behind-the-ears senator attempted to smear Audit Commission chairman Tony Shepherd in a senate committee hearing on Friday. The hearings, the second since the Audit Commission was set to work last year, were designed to assist the public probe the commission's members about their work. Dastyari chose to ignore the five-volume report (three volumes are exhaustive appendices) and try to play the man. Tony Shepherd has been engaged in the construction business longer than Dastyari has been on Earth. He has spent 40 years nation building, putting together huge infrastructure projects including the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, the Moomba to Sydney ethane pipeline, the Anzac warships, Victoria's CityLink and Eastlink tollways, Sydney's Walsh Bay redevelopment, power stations, railways, highways and freeways, the stuff that makes the nation work. Never has there been a suggestion of corruption raised or his integrity questioned. Until he met Labor's neophyte senator carrying his bucket of slime, that is. Dastyari prides himself as a Labor warrior and is held up as such by Labor's media cheer squad. Anne Summers, former prime minister Julia Gillard's feminist spear carrier, approvingly noted in a profile in the Sydney Morning Herald last August that it 'was no doubt reassuring that … "Dastyari had married Helen Barron, an economist he'd met while she was on the staff of former NSW ALP premier Morris Iemma, and the daughter of renowned ALP svengali Peter Barron. Barron could be expected to give sound advice to his young son-in-law, as would other party elders such as Unions NSW boss Mark Lennon and Barron's close friend Graham Richardson, who had been NSW ALP general secretary from 1976 to 1983." The Labor senator began his attack on the commission, made up primarily of respected former senior public servants, asking whether it had a "disproportionately conservative make-up?" Putting aside the obvious fact that the politics of public servants should never be an issue, one might ask whether Dastyari could possibly suggest a single MP from his own side of politics who had served in any senior financial capacity with any credibility or who could match any of the committee members in the integrity stakes. Forget it. He then delved into the Sussex Street mire to ask Shepherd about a donation that he allegedly made to a foundation association connected to the NSW Liberal Party in 2010. Shepherd would have none of it and, unflustered, pointed out that when he was associated with the construction giant, Transfield, he had banned the company from making any political donations. He did so because, in NSW, under Dastyari's Labor Party, the stench of corruption was spreading like noxious bilge oil. It is to the credit of Greens Senator Richard Di Natale that he quickly moved to dissuade the junior senator from his unprincipled and totally irrelevant attack. It would also appear that Di Natale took the first opportunity at the end of the hearing to apologise for Dastyari's behaviour before shaking Shepherd's hand. Dastyari's gutter behaviour reflects the worst of Labor's response to the Audit Commission's considerable efforts. Most Australians understand that the commission's recommendations are broad guidelines for fixing Labor's economic mess. As Shepherd told Dastyari and the other senators on Friday: "There is no such thing as government money, only taxpayers' money, and we shouldn't ask the taxpayer to continue to pay for duplication and inefficiencies."