On Thursday, 12 February 2026 I gave an adjournment speech calling out the LNP for taking a $600k donation from Adani right before the State election.
You can read my full speech below or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
I start with a rhetorical question, clearly not asking you, Deputy Speaker, but I am curious: what do you call it when a company gives a political party or a politician huge sums of money and gets favourable treatment in return? That is clearly bribery and I would go so far as to call it corruption.
Government members interjected.
Mr BERKMAN: Listen to these guys! Listen to them. Yappity yap! It is happening in Queensland. For anyone who has not been paying attention to the media reporting in recent days and weeks, I will go on a little trip back in time. We all know the company, Adani. They call themselves Bravus these days because their reputation was so sullied, but let’s call them Adani, the common parlance. They made a $600,000 donation right before the Queensland state election. It was not disclosed until just this month because they managed to use a federal loophole so that voters were not aware of it before we went to the polls. Queensland disclosure laws were sidestepped so that we did not know about it.
We were completely unaware that this kind of funding was going on, for our now government. This was, believe it or not—they have made plenty of them—Adani’s biggest ever political donation, the biggest one they have made yet. We have to ask why. Fast-forward a little bit, not too much further, because within the first year of this LNP government’s election, the government decided to drop a court case that would have cost Adani hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
By way of reminder, a royalty is what a company has to pay to extract the resources that belong to the people of Queensland before they sell them on and make massive profits. It is rent paid on resources to us. That is money that clearly could have funded public housing development, free school breakfasts or any number of different things, but instead it is now lining the pocket of one of the world’s dodgiest coalminers. It is a secret deal, no less. We are not able to know the details of this deal apparently because it is commercial-in-confidence. We cannot forget that Adani has also been a donor to Labor, back before they signed the final approvals for the mine to go through in the first place.
Let’s be clear what is happening here. The LNP colluded with Adani to exploit a loophole in our donation laws. They took hundreds of thousands of dollars, then negotiated a secret deal on royalties. That deal means that hundreds of millions of dollars remain in Adani’s pocket rather than funding Queensland schools, hospitals and homes. If this isn’t an argument for banning corporate donations, like the Greens have been calling for for years now, then I do not know what is.